


I Will Be

by LusBeatha



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Elrond is Trans, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Gen, I just base all my stories around plants the way Tolkien did with languages ok, LaCE Compliant But LaCE Critical, Maedhros is Trans, Plant-medicine Without Plot, Trans Male Character, gender is hard, moody teenage Elrond, talking about gender with the mass-murdering foster-parents who sacked your city is harder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-27 06:42:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18191108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LusBeatha/pseuds/LusBeatha
Summary: In which Elrond realizes he is an elf and not an elleth, studies botanical medicine and thinks all matters should be solvable with plants, has absolutely no intention of choosing between being a healer and being a warrior, and finds empathy in surprising places.





	I Will Be

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: misgendering & deadnaming (almost all of it in the first section); a tiny nongraphic reference to misgendering in the context of torture; some discussion of dysphoria; the general angst that goes along with your severely depressed foster-father really wanting to support you in living your best queer life but being a bit too much of a mess to always really do so. I'm very sorry, this was a little 500-word piece of fluff that got wildly out of hand, and I'd absolutely rather you didn't read it if you think it'll upset you.
> 
> medical disclaimer: this feels pretty obvious, but. the medicinal plants referenced here are amazingly helpful when used appropriately, but if you get all the way through this fic and still think throwing back huge doses of phytoandrogens and yang tonics is inherently safe or will magically change every aspect of your biology overnight, i've failed both as a writer and an herbalist. also, elvish spandex is made from a specific plant fiber only available in first-age beleriand and is way more comfy and practical than the stuff humans make, and i promise that no matter how good of a binder you have it is still absolutely possible to injure your ribs while doing broadsword drills. please, nobody hurt yourselves and say "but Elrond did it!"
> 
> notes: for practical reasons, since the Feanorians have by this point reverted back to Quenya for daily use, elf men and women are here referenced as neri (nér) and nissi (nís) - any reference to man or woman refers to a human. if you've read any Tolkien at all you will forgive me for giving Elrond a deadname that starts with "el" - it would have been weirder not to. i know that LaCE was written much later and wasn't actually the kind of thing elves would make their kids read, but it fit better that way, so. does elvish medicine have a concept of hormones? probably not, but i got tired of thinking up metaphors, so now it does.

 

## F.A. 544

 

“But they smell like piss.”  Elros wrinkles his nose as he shakes clumps of soil from a long, glossy taproot the color of bone, wispy hairs spreading as he dunks them into a basin of water.  As he reaches his muddy fingers up to fiddle with the little silver rings plaited into his hair, he leaves little streaks of dirt along the side of his face.  This, at least, makes him easily confusable with his twin, who almost always has earth or plant-pigments staining some part of his clothing or skin.  Though his hair is shorter than Elrond’s, and he has recently taken to leaving his wild mass of fluffy curls unbound seemingly for no other reason than to frustrate Makalaurë, Elros has begrudgingly agreed to allow his own to be braided in the style of Noldorin neri, with many small braids winding diagonally along the side of his head.

At twelve years old, Elrond’s favorite prank is to dress in Elros’s clothing and pose as his twin.  But he finds in unnerving, that Elros’s mannerisms have begun to diverge from his own: the way he holds his spine tall and shoulders straight as he walks, his voice that is bold and sure where Elrond’s is ordinarily halfway between shy and furious.  Elrond snatches a handful of ashwagandha away from his brother, the outer layers of the wet roots shimmering almost translucent, laying them on the board where he chops them into even-sized pieces to be dried. 

 _“When you stand like that, I can see your tits.  You’re going to give us away,”_ he hears Elros’s voice inside his mind. 

 _“I don’t have tits!”_ Elrond protests indignantly, slouching his shoulders forward and trying not to look down.  The sleeves of Elros’s tunic are rolled up above his elbows.

“Hence its name,” Makalaurë provides helpfully, though from the slight narrowing of his eyes he must suspect the presence of another conversation beyond his earshot.  “ _Like a horse._   Some would say that the plant’s distinctive smell is reminiscent of the _urine_ of a horse.”  As he speaks, the older elf is carefully removing bright red berries from their papery casings, sorting them into piles.  His gaze darts constantly between the task before him, and Elrond’s hand on the knife, his gaze at once dreamy and attentive, the whites of his eyes the same color as the clouds gathering overhead.

“That’s not what Ectarmo says.” Elros smirks.  “ _Strong_ as a horse.”  Unlike his twin, Elros has befriended every soldier in the guard, and is always bringing news and gossip and wrestling techniques and cursewords back to the less-sociable Elrond.

Elrond flicks some water from the basin at his brother, afraid that if he keeps speaking, he will give their ruse away.  In return, his twin deliberately shakes one of the dirty roots at him, splattering his clothing with mud.

“There is some debate among the loremasters as to whether the name is reference to the smell of the cut root, or its use to increase virility,” Makalaurë agrees pleasantly, with a pointed look at their behavior.

“But I had thought it was for _sleep_.  The healers use it for elves who are fading with grief, or recovering from injuries.  You give it to us to drink every night.”  Elrond is eyeing the roots now with intrigue, their pungent juices staining his hands.  Though he has begun to train in the healing arts, lessons in botanical medicine have for the most part pertained to the healing of wounds – a practical skill in the Fëanorian camp, where the great War is mostly a series of quiet retreats, moving too often and striking only when enemies are encroaching on their territory.  The wounds of war, though, are inevitable: only recently, they’d been forced to move camp when a great force of orcs three times the size of their own, and led by many balrogs, had encroached on their stronghold at Amon Ereb.  _(If we’re lucky, they’ll kill us all, Maedhros had said.  “We may deserve that, but the children don’t,” Makalaurë argued, and ordered the retreat.)_

“But _that,_ Elwen, is precisely why the healers’ art is so complex: many plants are normalizers, that will look inside you and see what needs to be balanced.  So when they see a man who is… lacking in sexual power, they’ll support him.  And when they see a tired girl who’s ruined her sleep-rhythms by reading old lorebooks late into the night, they’ll normalize that too.”

“Is that always true?  What if you were _trying_ to unbalance – ”

“ _I’m_ Elwen,” Elros interrupts cheerfully, simultaneously calling into Elrond’s mind: _“Stop it, stop it, now you’re_ really _giving us away.”_   “But are we done yet?  I told Telumbion and Ectarmo that I would help check on the rabbit-traps.”  Elros has taken to following after the captains of the guard around like a hound pup, after his similar devotion to Maedhros had been met by the other deliberately slipping away whenever he approached outside of designated lesson times.

“How strange.”  Though Makalaurë’s tone is light and amused, it carries an underlying power that seems to easily permeate the lie.  “I’ve never known you to _not_ want further botany training, Elwen.  Very well then, Elros,” he turns back to Elrond, “while your sister goes to help with the trapping, shall I show you how to process the seeds for saving?  They will not overwinter here on their own.”

As he drops the last of the ashwagandha roots on the table in front of Elrond, Elros chortles and winks, nods to Makalaurë, and scampers away.  _“Enjoy your piss-roots,”_ comes his gently teasing voice in Elrond’s head.

 _“Enjoy your dead rabbits,”_ Elrond replies, smiling.

After his twin is gone, Makalaurë shows Elrond how to crush the thin skins of the cherry-like fruits, cleaning the flesh away and spreading the tiny seeds on a cloth to dry.  The berry-juice stains the water and their hands like bright, congealed blood.

 

*

 

On exactly one occasion, Elros pretends to be Elrond.  “You look as fair as Lúthien herself,” Elrond mutters appreciatively as he ties the laces at the back of his brother’s dress, fixes a few blue ribbons into his hair, and then frowns.  Perhaps it is his imagination, but he and his brother no longer seem to have quite the same facial shape.

 _“What is wrong?”_  Elros often reverts back to osanwë when he is concerned.

 _“Nothing.  You look like a queen!”_ Elrond tries to gently close his thoughts away from his twin without the other noticing that he is doing so.  _“You look like mother.”_

Elros takes his skirts in his hands and gives an exaggerated curtsey.  When the twins had first been taken captive, Elwing had dressed her only daughter in the finest fabrics that could be scrounged in a city of refugees; and the guilt-ridden nissi of the Fëanorian camp have been all too willing to shower their new princess with the finest hand-me-downs to be found in their rough settlement.  “That’s because you always look like Mother,” Elros says, aloud again now.

Elrond chooses matching earrings for both of them.  Having no possessions left from his birth parents, he has accumulated an ever-expanding collection of Noldorin jewelry from a community desperate to ease the bitter self-hatred that eats their camp from the inside out.  “Well, if the healers ask you to sing, it’s over.”  Elros has a strong, fair voice for song, but Elrond has been known to accidentally call a shower of golden light down around the camp like a halo, simply from humming to himself as he read a book; and at times he’s inadvertently caught glimpses into the minds or futures of those standing beside him when he sings.  That kind of power and foresight, though he understands it not, would be difficult for Elros to mimic.  “We should offer to go foraging, and then no one will ask you too many questions.  Do you even _know_ the difference between dandelion and chicory?”

“I know they’re both edible, at least.  Calm down, I won’t poison us.  Here, let me braid your hair now.”  Neither of their plaits are quite as tight nor elaborate as might have been if Makalaurë had done them, but at least they both have the long, thick braids folded over the fronts of their ears, that are commonly worn by the nissi of their camp.

Looking briefly frustrated at the two Elronds who come to join him in the makeshift common-area at the center of their new-built camp, Makalaurë lets out a near-inaudible sigh before over-brightly wishing them both a good morning.  Maedhros, speaking with two other soldiers some distance away, is clearly watching out of the corner of his eye, but shows no reaction.

Elros does a good show of sprawling in a queenly fashion across a bench in a manner so exaggerated that Elrond actually _hopes_ no one thinks it is him.  Elrond tries to pick at his breakfast in a way that mimics his flighty, daydreaming brother, whose elaborate fantasies he often catches on the fringes of their mid-connection: pirate-ships battling on rough seas, winds so strong they catch the sails to carry boats up into the clouds.  For all the time he spends alone with a book, Elrond gets the reputation as the dreamier twin – but he doubts his brother has caught one word that Makalaurë is saying to them.

But as the morning wears on, Elrond grows crosser and crosser, watching his brother pretending to be him.  Though the peredhil generally partake in the same games and pastimes in equal measure, both being just as likely to dance between the trees and pretend to be Lúthien as they are to play Dagor Bragollach with swords made from tree-branches, there is something about watching Elros act out the role naturally imposed on him by the social order of their camp, that grates at him.  It is like watching his own life from outside.  Elros is a convincing actor, and yet still it seems a caricature of someone Elrond was never sure he intended to be.

It is afternoon when his brother abandons their ruse, laughing and desperately flustered at the bread-dough he is supposed to be kneading, an activity which Elrond has begun to become proficient in and which his brother has never attempted.  Having neither time nor space for the cultivation of corns, their bread is made now with bitter, gritty wild grains that have a texture like sand.  Seeming bored and frustrated with a task unfamiliar with him, Elros begins to throw the ball of dough up in the air and repeatedly catches it, higher and higher, until finally it grazes a branch of one of the trees that grow alongside the outdoor kitchen and comes back spattered with bark and twigs.

Makalaurë politely calls them both _Elwen_ for the rest of the day, and Elros does not change his clothing.  But Elrond’s discomfort is visible, and Elros never tries this again.

 

*

 

Sometimes, Makalaurë takes up a particular style of singing that is at once more intimate and distant than anything Elrond has ever heard, alone without his harp, embellishing and modifying the lyrics in the same way that he might adapt one of their bedtime-stories from night to night.  He faces the corner of the room, seeming almost lost in thought; and occasionally, Maedhros sits beside him and takes his hand.  Elrond had thought it moral support or some rare display of affection.  The bards he remembered in Sirion had not sung like that.

“It is a Noldorin tradition,” Makalaurë explains carefully.  “That is the old way to sing certain laments: even playing the harp at the same time, spreads out some of the power that might have been concentrated in the voice.  If I were to face you for the whole song, some might find it hard to look me in the eyes; and when I am channeling that poetry through my body, I can hand that energy on.  Otherwise it can be too much, even for me.  Like the healing songs you’ve been learning, but it’s _story_ you’re sharing, and emotion, rather than energy.  Would you like to learn?”

The song they choose is an old tale of the choosing of the First Kings at Cuiviénen, with a chorus that says _kings were chosen, under light of stars / kings unbowed, their heads held high –_ Carefully Elrond repeats each verse, committing them to memory.  And when he has begun to catch on to that peculiar manner of channeling all of his own hopes and grievances into the telling, Makalaurë sits back and lets him sing it alone.  The song is moving through him like a ray of starlight – _three kings / by the shadows of the Rider undevoured –_ his clear voice much higher than his teacher’s.  And he understands now the need to avert his eyes, for all the energy he feels rising in his own fëa; and when he has finished, his eyes are shining, and he begs his foster-father to teach him another.

And at this, Makalaurë’s eyes gleam with pride, and gladly he obliges.  But now, as Elrond hesitantly reaches out his hand in the midst of a verse of the ancient tale of the coming of the Eldar to Valinor, on a great island uprooted from the shores of Beleriand, pulled by the servants of Ulmo, his Sight catches him at unawares.  The images of sea turtles and treelit winds that had been carried on the older elf’s voice, twist into visions of corpses floating face-down in the ocean under starlight, makeshift weapons made from the tools of shipbuilding lying beside bloodied bodies on a shoreline.

Elrond pulls his hand back as though burned.

Makalaurë’s whole body has stiffened, and he does not meet Elrond’s eyes.  “I am sorry.  I did not mean to – ”

“To show me?” Elrond asks quietly.  “Or to kill them?”  Elrond has not forgotten how his foster-fathers came to first kidnap and then adopt him and his twin, and sometimes he catches awful glimpses of the two earlier kinslayings when he wanders by accident into the dreams of other elves in the camp.  He neither forgives, nor holds a grudge, because his life with the kinslayers is all he has ever known.  Still, the shock of seeing such a thing playing out on his waking vision, when only a moment before he had been immersed in the joy of learning a new skill, is jarring.  “I am sorry,” he says, shaking his head as though this could clear the blood and gore that feels as though it has been painted across his eyelids, trying to reconcile his horror at such slaughter with his desire to embrace his foster-father and hold him until the horror fades from his eyes.  “No – I am,” he adds, as Makalaurë begins to protest, “I should not have spoken so.  I should have better control – you don’t want to think of such things any more than I – ”

“You will never apologize for such a thing, ever again!”  Makalaurë’s voice leaves no room for argument.  “You are _twelve years old_ , and it would be unreasonable beyond measure to expect yourself to have total control over your Sight by now.  And we will – we will find ways to work this out.  So that this does not happen again.”

Elrond almost asks, _do you mean so that I will never See things by accident again, or so that you don’t kill people again?_   If it were Maedhros, he could say such things, and the other might congratulate him on asking a fair question.  But he holds his tongue, and nods.

From then on, Elrond only studies music if there are at least two harpists and four singers and the most cheerful lyrics possible, sometimes memorizing the words and tune of historical ballads separately instead of singing them all at once.

 

*

 

Every elf remaining in the Fëanorian camp is either a kinslayer or family of one, too ashamed or proud afraid to leave.  The handful of younger elves are for the most part fatherless and bitter results of hopeless nights before the last two kinslayings, and they have learned from birth that they are _cursed_.  The Peredhil are not cursed, and so they are an anomaly to elflings who have only ever known bad luck and fierce arguments and an isolated woodland life.  Elrond remains for the most part polite and distant, spending most of his time with his twin or alone with a book, for the most part only encountering other young people when they come to the healers’ tents, or in his morning weapons-training.

The nís with whom he is sparring today, is easily his match in scowling resentment and has the advantage of being several decades older than him, though Elrond is the taller and has the benefit of additional training with both of his foster-parents.

 

 _(“I am only doing this,” Elrond said begrudgingly on his first day he had held a training-sword, “so that I can kill you.”  He had been seven years old at the time.  Makalaurë had insisted that they were too young;_ the Secondborn start at four years, _Maedhros had argued,_ and their parents grew as quickly as mortals, or had you forgotten?

_Maedhros bowed his head slightly, seeming to regard Elrond’s threat as serious.  “If it should come to that,” he had said, grave and careful, “I want to know that you will succeed.”  And he had taken it upon himself to train the twins, nonjudgmentally training them to focus their anger and fear of him into practical swordsmanship._

_“A soldier at attention,” Maedhros had said in his first lesson, “stands waiting, with tailbone tucked, like an obedient dog – that is the posture of someone who is waiting to be told who to fight and what to die for.  We are all being subconsciously controlled by our_ hröar, _whether we realize it or not.  “A warrior stands with knees bent, legs apart, like so.”_

 _And he makes them practice the same stances, over and over – no, don’t just stand how I_ tell _you, you should never have to look at your feet, feel how your body_ wants _to stand – ”)_

Though he and his sparring-partner are on the same comfortable but distant terms that mark all of Elrond’s with most other elves in the camp, still whenever he wins a round, she glowers as though her people have just failed to win the silmaril in yet another kinslaying.

Maedhros calls a few brisk words of praise from nearby, as Elrond takes his blunted sword from her throat and steps back, swinging his sword in a few circles, proud in his victory.  It is only when he looks up that he realizes that two other young elves, sparring on the other side of the makeshift training-area, are not even attempting to disguise their eyes travelling up and down his body.  Elrond frowns self-consciously, fidgeting with the collar of his tunic.

For less than a second he pauses to think, before springing on both elves at once, before either has a chance to find a defensive stance.  He disarms both elves ferociously, stinging with fury at the way their gazes make him automatically less of a warrior and more of a nís.  Their weapons are sent clattering to the ground, the one elf’s ribcage held lightly beneath his foot, his sword at the throat of the other, almost before he has realized what he is doing.

There is a long, vindictive moment of silence, in which he feels _is_ indeed the great-granddaughter of Lúthien, ready to strangle a Fëanorian.  But the look on the other elf’s face, more smirk than fear, seems only to sexualize him further.  And so he backs away, and returns his training-sword to its holding-rack with furious red tinging the corners of his vision, and storms from the training-ring.  He hears Elros’s voice calling after him in his mind.

 _“I’m fine_ , _”_ he tells his twin.  _“I just… want to be alone.”_

 _"I’ll kick their asses again, for you,"_ Elros offers pleasantly.

As he retreats, Elrond hears Maedhros rebuking the other elves, but he does not care.  He does not want Maedhros to intervene on his behalf.  He is at once relieved that the older elf does not attempt to follow him, and disappointed because he wants an excuse to snap at someone.

From that day on, he avoids training during the day with the others, taking his turn in the guard with sullen silence and running through practice-drills with his foster-fathers late into the night.  _It isn’t self-consciousness,_ he tells himself.  He only doesn’t have time; the healers need his help; there are songs to learn and plants to harvest and medicines to prepare, and if this means his education in weaponry comes now almost exclusively from his foster-parents in the early mornings and late evenings, well, he must begrudgingly admit that there is no better teacher.

“You need not train any more than you desire to,” Maedhros reminds him.  “To be a healer is an honorable path in itself.  Most elves choose only one or the other.”  The head of the healers, Nornonis, has told him the same, again and again, in the same sharp voice she uses to drill him on the properties of medicinal plants, until he comes to resent the words like a tedious lesson too oft repeated: _You should be able to defend yourself, but violence will taint your ability to practice the healing arts._ She does not say aloud what it is that he should be able to defend himself against.

“I have to be able to kill you,” Elrond insists, though by now the words are becoming hardly more than a well-engrained idiom, repeated over and over until he no longer thinks anything of it.

 

*

 

Makalaurë makes a good show of smiling and gently trying to make a guessing-game of the days when two Elroses report to him for lessons; but Elrond can tell that he finds it trying, when the twins refuse to relent for multiple days in a row.  The real Elros seems to find vindictive satisfaction in their foster-father’s annoyance, but Elrond is beginning to feel that he is disappearing inside of his twin – that they are no longer two halves of a whole, but now only Elros and not-quite-Elros.

One evening, peering between the slight gap in the fabric of the tent that his foster-fathers share, Elrond overhears them discussing the matter in hushed voices.  Though they’ve managed to stay in place for several years now, there are few permanent structures in the settlement because of the lingering threat of having to flee.

Maedhros sits beneath the small fire beneath the smoke-hole in the center of the roof, shoulders hunched, staring blankly ahead.  He is eating automatically without seeming to notice or care what is on the plate before him, a mass of fire-scorched wild plants that have been sitting cold on a wooden plate for two days now.  Makalaurë has been teaching the twins to cook – _all Noldorin men cook_ , he told them, and Elrond had felt his ears perk at this.  _You are hardly Noldor_ , Maedhros had said dismissively, but the simultaneous image that Elrond had caught from Makalaurë’s more-open mind in that moment, of two young dark-haired Noldorin princes very similar in appearance to his brother, spoke otherwise.  Elrond wondered fleetingly if that was how he himself must look, though he hasn’t seen a mirror since the sack of Sirion.

“Elwen was so proud to have prepared all of that food,” Makalaurë says, sounding vaguely chastising.  “You should have seen the look on her face!  She was sorry that you did not stay to feast with us.  At least,” and his voice tightens slightly.  “I assume it was Elwen.  I _do_ wish they would trust me.”

“Would _you_ have trusted you?” Maedhros asks mildly, without looking up.  “Surely you can see that they do not hate you – there seems to be no force in Arda that can stop them from calling us _Atar_ , whether we will it or not – but they can have love for you, without trust.  We sacked their city; we slaughtered their friends, and we tried to kill their mother.  No kindness will erase that.  Whatever the songs may tell of us, let it never be said that we’ve raised gullible children.”

Makalaurë does not answer.

Maedhros laughs softly without humor, a horrible laugh like the lick of flame on bone.  “Besides, what does it matter?  Perhaps they should both be named Elros.  _You_ shall go on confusing them with Ambarussa, in any case.”

“That is not fair.”

Maedhros snorts.  “The truth is rarely fair.”  From this angle, Elrond cannot see his face, only one side of Makalaurë’s, his grimace closer to shame than anger.  “If this is what brings them comfort, let them do so!  Their identities are all they have left,” Maedhros continues with an awful wistfulness in his tone that makes the visible sliver of Makalaurë’s face cringe, “we’ve taken everything else.”  Elrond have never phrased it this way inside his head.  Seeing his own intentions laid out in such a manner, and from such a source, is disconcerting, as though the older elf can heed his thoughts better than he himself can.  “And maybe it’s for the best,” Maedhros adds.  “There _is_ a reason you don’t give names to cattle raised for slaughter.”

There is the sound of a sudden movement, and Makalaurë’s form is standing now, the back of his cloak blocking Elrond’s view.  Realizing that the other elf is about to storm from the tent, Elrond hastily scampers away, back to the room that he shares with his brother, to repeat the conversation he’s just overheard in a combination of hushed whispers and mind-talk.

Soon after, a soft voice outside their door calls, even more sweetly than usual: “Elwen?  Elros?  May I come in?  I’ve brought you some tea.”

Elros stares down at the tea disdainfully.  He stands between Elrond and his foster-father with a protectiveness that had until now mostly faded away.  “We’re not thirsty,” he says.

From the bewildered then slightly abashed turn of his expression, Makalaurë must suspect what they have overheard.  “I will leave these here, then,” he says, his voice far too gentle, but warbling slightly in that strange way that makes the whole room vibrate near-imperceptibly with his grief, so that the clay mugs rattle very slightly against the surface of the table long after he is gone.

That night, Elrond drinks his own tea, and then his brother’s.  The ashwagandha is bitter, but not as unpleasant as the fresh roots that have made the herbal drying-racks a place to avoid; and Makalaurë has mixed in a generous helping of the precious honey that is usually rationed out in careful teaspoons.  “I like the taste,” he insists, at his brother’s glare, though their foster-fathers’ earlier words are still ringing in his ears.

And from that night on, he continues to drink both his own tea and Elros’s, craving something he cannot quite name.  And he tells himself he wants to be strong enough to defend himself and his twin, and that anger is no reason to let good medicine go to waste.  But still, he tries to hide his disappointment when the tea does not make his voice swoop lower in the way that Elros’s has.  Nor does it prevent the inevitable day that it becomes difficult to button his brother’s tunics over his chest.

 _Their identities are all they have left_ , Elrond keeps thinking.  And he knows that he is supposed to be the only daughter of Elwing and the great-granddaughter of Lúthien, and he tries to act like it.  And at least for few years, it seems to work.

 

 

 

## F.A. 551

## Spring

 

“There are some Secondborn who use branches of nettle to whip at their own legs when long marches make them ache.” Maedhros harvests the nettles bare-handed, pinching the thin stems apart with his fingernails with seeming indifference to the soft white-and-pink welts rising against the sides of his fingers, “It may sting for an few hours, but then it will bring the pain down for a day or two.”  Elrond realizes that the other elf, who he has rarely seen without tall boots and many layers of clothing, is barefoot, with the bottoms of his leggings and the sleeves of his tunic rolled up – that he is _intentionally_ trying to catch that sting.  He wonders if this is why Maedhros, with whom he and his brother are generally on civil but avoidant terms, has volunteered to aid the peredhil in this task.

It is early springtime, and the new purplish nettles in the hedge that surrounds their camp have never been more welcome.  Winter has been especially harsh this year, not on account of the weather, but in the eerie lack of birds in the sky, and the sparsity of the harvest the previous autumn.  Many trees no longer bear fruit, and they must travel father and farther to hunt; even the rabbits are disappearing.  The land seems to know something that the elves do not.  Nettle soup is more fortifying than miruvoir after months carefully-rationed portions of dried meat and bread. 

“Of course,” Maedhros adds, “there are also Secondborn who’ll take the stings of bees, for similar reasons.  Put your gloves back on.”

Elros, who has taken to attempting anything that he’s been told that humans do, begrudgingly complies.

“The roots we will gather in autumn,” Maedhros continues, “when the plants draw their energy away from their seeds, and back into the ground.” He turns toward Elrond. “What can you tell us about the differences in the use of the leaf and root in medicine?” It is more command than question; Elrond has been eagerly absorbing any information about medical botany that he can gather, both from Makalaurë and from the few healers still remaining in their small camp, who are in turns grateful and wary of their apprentice’s uncanny ability to know which herb a patient will need simply by looking at them, regardless of whether it is a plant that he is familiar with.  They, in turn, make a point of quizzing him on the properties of different medicines at arbitrary moments, until he has grown accustomed to having to suddenly recite fifty uses for rue or pennyroyal at a moment’s notice.  The Fëanorians have moved camp three times in the years since the sack of Sirion, each new location offering more flora and fauna to bring variety to Elrond’s botany studies, and also new dangers: nests of spiders as large as horses, roaming packs of wargs, and most recently a young dragon, the size of a horse, which Elros had attacked singlehandedly against direct orders and was subsequently forbidden from joining their foster-fathers on any expeditions outside of the camp for a year.

“I have never used the roots – the healers sat they are usually not necessary for elvish hröar.  Impaired kidney function in mortals.  Water retention.”  Accustomed to longwinded debates on minor technicalities of the best extraction method for nettle-leaves with the healers, Elrond finds himself embarrassingly tongue-tied when faced with such a simple question from the foster-father he rarely sees without a sword in his hand.  He hesitates, trying to simultaneously focus on the question and to detangle the hem of his skirt from the long, purplish branches of brambles that have tangled their way behind the nettle-patch.  The skirts worn by the Noldorin nissi have such useful deep pockets that he does not begrudge his brother his less easily-tangled leggings, though more and more often Elrond has taken to borrowing Makalaurë’s long, embroidered robes, which the other always seems happy to share.  _A compromise_ , Elrond calls it in his head, though he could not quite articulate on what he is compromising.  “When Nornonis says, _when in doubt, give nettles_ , I think she means the leaves, for any sort of malnutrition or blood deficiency.  And it’s true – I feel I could eat the whole plant raw,” he admits, feeling a twinge of guilt for complaining – the peredhil are always given more than their share of food, even if it means their foster-fathers go hungry.

“Certainly our hröar are made to appreciate the first greens of spring,” Maedhros agrees, “much in the way that roots aid us more in the autumn, when bodies grow stagnant from too much time sitting indoors.  Or, most poetically, in the case of the Secondborn, in the _autumn of years_ , as they describe it, when their entire urogenital systems break down like armor that has seen too many battles and stagnate like a frozen swamp in winter.”  As he speaks, Maedhros plucks a single nettle leaf, tinged with its springtime purple, and then eats it, his expression thoughtful rather than pained.

Elrond makes an involuntary empathetic grimace of his lips, and Elros says, almost accusatorily: “I thought it was a _joke_ that Fëanorians eat raw nettles.”

But Maedhros shows them how to pinch off a single leaf, fold it over, and consume it in one deft movement without letting the sting catch their tongues.

 _“Next we’ll be drinking the blood of our enemies,”_ Elros says into his mind, but it isn’t scorn as much as the begrudging respect for their foster-parents who have taught them so much about the ways of the woods and survival, knowledge they might never have gained as the children of royalty in an elvish city.

 _“First one to eat the most without stinging themselves wins_ , _”_ Elrond responds.

About twenty leaves into their game, Maedhros catches on and sends them back with stinging tongues and a few sharp remarks about even real Fëanorians not being quite so idiotic, and their baskets full to the brim with green nettle-tops.

 

*

 

The tall pines just beyond western edge of their settlement have put out their new green shoots, and the healers set Elrond brewing great vats of tea from the bluish needles.  The trees’ bright catkins have begun to swell with pollen.  They bring three guards to stand at the base of the pines, while a small group of elves strap large cloth bags over their shoulders, climbing like rodents from stones to shrubs and up into the lower branches of the tall trees before the ominous stormclouds on the horizon can reach them and wash the newly-released pollen away.

The peredhil’s lessons in cooking, begun as a traditional education, have turned increasingly creative as they scrounge for sources of nourishment.  It has grown progressively more dangerous to venture far beyond the confines of their camp, even to hunt or gather food, and even those who had begun to murmur of betraying their lords and breaking their ties to the Fëanorian camp, are deterred by the frequency of skirmishes with large groups of orcs marching northward to join the main War.

Elrond is trying to figure out exactly how Maedhros has climbed this high up into the tree, whose branches are sporadic and spaced far apart.  “We would have competitions, in Himring, climbing poles thirty feet in the air.  The trick is to use your knees,” he calls down, as though guessing Elrond’s thoughts.  “And also, to be too stubborn to let your soldiers be able to do anything you can’t.  But there is stubbornness and then there’s _recklessness_ , Elros,” he calls up to the other peredhel, who seems to have grown more interested in tree-climbing than the harvest.

Elros makes an indignant noise in the back of his throat, but carefully hugs the tree’s great trunk to slide down to a lower branch.  The pines here are hundreds of years old, so thick that five elves holding hands could not circle them. 

But Elrond is good at being stubborn, and within an hour his clothing and hands and hair are so sticky with pine-pitch that he feels the resin alone might keep him stuck to the tree.  Two other healers who have accompanied them are singing a harvest-song in praise of Yavanna, the chorus of which names pine _grandmother tree_ and _Yavanna’s first child_.  From here, the western edge of the Taur-im-Duinath, they can see the flat, grey expanse of the sea in the distance, melding into the sky.

 _“I think I can see Balar,”_ Elros suggests hopefully inside his mind.

 _“That’s a cloud,”_ Elrond insists.  Most days it feels that they are as likely to be reunited with any elves outside the Fëanorian camp, as they are to join their father on his star in the sky.  But he realizes with a pang of his heart, that this thought no longer bothers him as it used to.

“One springtime, just after the Brogallach, the Enemy’s servants felled a great stand of pine along the upper regions of the river Narog,” Maedhros is saying.  They are balanced on the same branch, but his reach is long enough to collect the catkins that Elrond cannot.  “Such beautiful oldgrowth trees, their wasted pollens swirling thick through the water!  But something strange happened downstream, something I think even the Enemy could not have expected.  The fish started changing shape – the pine in the water was changing female fish into males.  The people who fished those waters, at least those who knew enough to tell the difference, began to see fishes halfway through that transformation.”

Elrond feels his not-quite-pointed ears perk at this in a particularly elvish manner, and he blushes, wondering if Maedhros is telling him this to mock him.  He wishes he had not bound his chest so tightly before coming on this expedition, because under its four layers of tight undergarments his abdomen feels so constricted that it is all he can do to keep his balance.  “But we all eat the pine,” he counters carefully.  “Nissi and neri alike.”

Maedhros shrugs.  His bag is full, and now he is leaning against the trunk of the tree, surveying the horizon, eyes flicking around, checking for threats.  “Preparation.  Time.  Quantity.  An elf can fell a single pine without impacting aquatic life; and so the nissi can take nourishment from pine-bread without any unwanted effects.  The songs you sing when you are harvesting pine, and later when you are preparing it, can have an effect as well: much like the songs the healers have taught you to ask the coltsfoot to ease a cough, or basil to bring down a fever.” 

Elrond has learned the songs that ask plantain-leaves to staunch bleeding, or rosemary to drive away a headache, but his own powers still feel like a confusing tangle of instinct and luck.  He tilts his head to where Nornonis and another healer are still singing, more and more fervently, as though each is trying to outdo the other in their praise of the tree.  “ _Grandmother-tree, mother of the forest_ ,” he repeats.  “It seems that would have the opposite effect,” he says, trying to keep his voice in the style of casual academic interest but unable to hide a slight warble of disappointment.

“Yes, the grandmother of the forest, but full to bursting with pollen: it seems like a contradiction, but then I think of my own grandmother.  That joke was made a lot, when I was young: that there was no yielding in my father, no calm, no water, nothing to quench him – that he could never have made a girl-child if he’d tried.”  Elrond rarely hears Maedhros mention his father, or his childhood, but his tone betrays no bitterness.

It is nearly sunset when they return to camp, sticky and exhausted, and leave the catkins to dry out for a few days before sifting them through a sieve.  The thick powder collects underneath like a strange yellow flour, and they mix it into the ground amaranth and wild flax with which they make their bread.  Elrond has mastered the baking of bread, if only because he likes that he can control every seed and grain and tuber and now pollen that goes into it: _the food builds the story_ , the healers always say, and Elrond delights in learning which seeds or oils will aid with each condition or constitution.

The next afternoon, Maedhros finds Elrond eating his fifth piece of pine-pollen bread in a row seated on the fence beside the outdoor kitchen, ankle crossed over his knee with a piece of parchment balanced on his leg, sketching the fungi growing out of the fencepost.  From this angle, he can reach the plates of food and jugs of tea on the table, but had thought himself at least partially hidden by the small, twisted maritime pine that grows alongside the chimney.  “You are not a fish,” his foster-father says mildly, without greeting. 

“Who said I wanted to be?”  The defiance in his tone sounds childish in his own ears.  He pulls his drawing closer and partially covers it with one hand.  “I was only hungry.”

“No one at all.”  Maedhros sounds faintly amused, and much gentler than Elrond is accustomed to.  “In any case, the androgenic effects are much stronger if it is steeped in alcohol beforehand.”  Maedhros smiles softly at whatever he sees in Elrond’s expression, and Elrond wonders if all elves in their camp find him this transparent.  “Do you know, fish or no fish, such a tincture does need two moons to brew, and it will preserve better that way.  The healers may find good use for it later on.”

He tries to sound professional.  “Yes.  I… would be interested to learn how to do that.”  Not remotely hungry, Elrond stares down at the sixth piece of bread in his hand, and then sets it back onto the tray on the table.

They measure out the newly-dried pollen into glass jars.  “A fish,” Maedhros says bluntly, as they work, “is labelled as male when you cut it open and examine its viscera before you cook it and eat it.  But _you_ are not a fish.”

Elrond has been training in the healing arts for many years, is more than proficient at stitching wounds, and has lost most squeamishness around the inner workings of elvish anatomy.  He has lived under the care of those who destroyed his childhood home, for nearly twice as long as he had lived with his mother, and allusions to violence at their hands no longer make him flinch.  Indeed, Maedhros seems determined to make sardonic references to kinslaying at any possible point, and whether for good or ill, his self-depreciating banter has proved desensitizing.  Still, the imagery sends an involuntary shudder up Elrond’s spine.

“And yet, sometimes the act of wearing clothing can feel even more exposed,” Maedhros continues factually, as though picking up on some previous conversation that they’d never had, as though they are still discussing the extraction of phytohormones and not the skin-crawling experience of dressing up in Makalaurë’s clothing and walking across camp, while passing elves hesitate and stutter as they politely call him _princess._

Elrond flushes, once again struck by the painful feeling that Maedhros knows him better than he knows himself.  His foster-father has just named aloud something he has a difficult time admitting in his own head: as though to walk down the street nude, with every curve of his body visible, would feel almost _less_ naked than to bind his chest and cover himself in the clothing of a nér – as though those layers that shelter him like many coats of paint, are more personal, more his true self than his own skin.  He pretends to be very occupied in measuring out the proper quantity of the sharp, acrid alcohol that is all that can be brewed from the tubers that grow wild here, and does not respond.

“That is the strange paradox of living in a society where to dress without color or jewels is to be naked.  I don’t imagine that the Avari face as much difficulty in the ways their internal selves are projected externally.  If a Noldo sees you change clothing, they think you’ve changed selves; if they see you dressed all in gray, they’ll assume you’re fading with grief, and if they see you with an eight-pointed star on your chest, they’ll assume you’re a kinslayer.”

Elrond looks up at his foster-father apprehensively, trying to gauge whether the other elf is philosophically upset that he’s thrown one of Ectarmo’s emblem-of-Fëanor tunics over his long, deep-pocketed skirts, or whether he’s taken note of Elrond’s ever-changing clothing choices: some days wearing Elros’s leggings and tunics with crowns of the daisies and yarrow he gathers for medicinal use, at other times pinning a red cloak with a silver star at his left shoulder in an imitation of Maedhros, over one of his more comfortable dresses.

Maedhros only continues, his tone light: “But where I was actually going with this, is that Makalaurë wishes that you would ask his permission before wearing his best robes to dig turmeric roots.  Though, he dotes on you too much to tell you so.”

Elrond, whose hands were shaking slightly around the jar of alcohol, expecting confrontation, feels an involuntary noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh in the back of his throat.  “I apologize.  I didn’t think he would mind.  They – they were already yellow.”

“And they’re even yellower, now.  But, more to the point: if you dislike the clothing you’ve been given, you only need to ask.” Maedhros is marking the sides of each jar with little symbols for the current phase of Tilion and ratio of pollen to liquid.

“Thank you.  I like _pockets_ ,” he says, a little too quickly, though it is true that the ability to carry medicines around with him, and easily gather small quantities of herbs, is a priority in his choices of clothing. “And I like to be _myself,_ and not just Second Elros.  And.  I guess I sometimes don’t like to look _too much_ like a nís?” he adds, tilting the statement up like a question, because he has never said so out loud before and yet there seems to be no point in denying it. The nervous tension that he had not realized he had been holding, at the prospect of having to somehow declare himself boldly before a disapproving family, lifts a little, and the sudden lack of pressure in his muscles is startling.

“I think that can be arranged,” Maedhros agrees politely, the corners of his mouth tipped slightly upward in a half-smile.

Elrond checks on the pine-pollen tincture more often than necessary, shaking the bottle and watching the clear liquid slowly turn to pale yellow, with a strange, leaping hope in his chest that he does not know how to name.

 

*

 

Some weeks later, Elrond awakes to the sound of Elros groaning and burying his face into the warm furs of his own bed on the opposite side of the tent, mumbled cursewords buried into the bedstraw mattress, while a thin shaft of sunrise slides through the smoke-hole in the roof.  While Elrond’s body seems to require more sleep than the average young elf, Elros quite vocally loathes morning shifts on guard-duty.  Though his twin casts him a guilty look, Elrond is relieved to be awakened: his dreams this night have been stranger and more distressing than even he is accustomed to.

Elrond rarely dreams of the sack of Sirion, in the way he had as a child, crawling nervously into Makalaurë’s bed to beg the other for a lullaby.  Now he sees the future and the present, interspersed with a wild blend of ordinary dreams in equal measure, so that he is never sure where prophecy and others’ memories end, and his own subconscious begins: whether Elros is actually going to transform into a whale (unlikely); or whether he will at some point have to duel with Telumbion while riding on the back of a giant snail (also unlikely); or whether Maedhros will dive headfirst into a pool of lava (very unlikely); or whether an ambush of giant spiders will surround their camp on the night of a full moon (much more probable).  But sometimes, too, he wanders by accident into his brother’s dreams, which occasionally involve various nissi in ways that make him cringe with embarrassment and then tease the other mercilessly upon waking.  Or, he travels well beyond the confines of their tent, never quite sure whose dream he is dreaming, sometimes having to face an awkward moment the next day, not wanting to ask the healers with whom his apprenticing who the nís on the horse was, or why they are so afraid of bats.

“I wish you’d keep your dreams inside your own head,” Elrond sighs.

“They are in my head!  Try and keep your _self_ inside of yours.”

 “Were both of them yours?” Elrond asks.  “The one with the ocean and the castle and the geese and the snowstorm, and the one with, well.”

Elros frowns.  He would never say it aloud, but Elrond knows he finds it frustrating when his twin remembers his dreams more clearly than he himself does.  “I don’t remember anything after the castle.  Was there more?”

“I… d’you know, it must have been mine.  It seemed the sort of thing my mind would come up with.”

_It had been dark, a dark that pressed smothering against his eyes and mouth.  He caught glimpses of stone walls in torchlight.  “My queen, my beautiful queen.”  The voice crawled across his skin.  Two bright eyes, round as a cat’s, stabbed into him like daggers, and though he tried to twist away from that harsh gaze, he could not move, pinned like a tapestry to a wall._

_“How do you define yourself as a king?” the voice sneered.  “It isn’t your body, that much is obvious.  Is it your lack of interest in dancing or needlework?  It isn’t your military strategy, or your swordsmanship, or why would we be here?  What_ is _it, precisely, that makes you a_ king _?”_

It had felt, and not felt, like the way Elrond flinches away from being called _Princess_ , like the way he feels lately that any eyes against his body make his skin crawl.  Certainly, it was nothing that should have been inside his brother’s consciousness.

“Are you quite all right?”  Elros is pulling leather armor over the same shirt he’d slept in, seeming less alert than he had while conversing with the sentient goose in his dream.

“Perfectly,” he says, watching Elros pull on his boots.  He glances back up at the shaft of visible sunlight, hesitates for a moment, and then climbs out of bed to rummage through the pile of practical, knee-length robes that Makalaurë had presented him with a few weeks before, much to his delight.  Fabric is scarce in the camp, and the clothes are all much-worn and repeatedly mended, almost all featuring a Fëanorian emblem or star embroidered into the fabric, but when Makalaurë tried to apologize for this, Elrond had embraced him and thanked him repeatedly before he could get the words out.  The other elf had opened and closed his mouth a few times, as though intending to say something else, but Elrond had darted away before he could say anything more.

 _“Are you sure?”_ Elros asks, in his mind this time.  _“Why ever would you get up at such a horrible hour if you were alright?”_

 _“Ladies’-mantle is best harvested when the dew is still caught in its leaves.”_ Hastily he shoves the dream into the back of his mind where he hopes his twin will not see.  _“I promised Nornonis that I would make another batch of extract.”_

He waits until his brother is gone, to pull on three layers of the underthings that the nissi typically wear under their armor, over his chest, which feels more constricting than a corset but at least makes his clothing fit more or less the same as it would a nér; he dresses in reds and golds and tucks a harvest-knife into his belt.  And Elrond convinces himself that his dream had been his own frightened fantasies.

That night, back in their tent once more, parchment balanced in his lap, pen in hand, sketching a diagram of the flowering-top of wild carrot, he says, _“I think I’m a nér.”_ He pretends to be very absorbed in his drawing, too much so, pushing the pen against the paper until a blot forms like black orc-blood in the middle of the delicate umbel of flowers.

 _“Alright.”_ Elros’s voice in Elrond’s mind is gentle and utterly unsurprised, as he throws another dart at a target on the opposite side of the tent.  After losing a game of darts to Ectarmo, he’s set up a small target against one wall of their living-space and has taken to practicing with it in every spare moment with any sharp object he can find, including table-knives and Elrond’s quills.

“What do you mean, _alright_?”

“I’m quite literally inside your mind, every day.”  His brother sounds faintly amused at his surprise.  He picks up another dart, but holds it in his hand, turning to meet his twin’s eyes, expression earnest.  “I was hoping you’d say something, soon; it was getting very uncomfortable.  Am I still allowed to call you Little Lúthien?”  That nickname had arisen almost entirely by accident, as in childhood both peredhil had been equally likely to dance between the trees and pretend to be their great-grandmother.

“No.”

“Little Beren, then?”

“Absolutely not!”

“So what do I call you?”

Elrond bites his lip, and frowns.  It’s not that he hasn’t given it considerable amounts of thought; but the name _Elwen_ is the only gift from his mother that he has left. “I don’t know.”

 

*

 

Spring is changing into summer, and the turn of the seasons brings its usual fey blend of joy and nostalgia, the smells of thunderstorms and blooming wildflowers catching tendrils of distant memories: packing up camp and moving suddenly every time he is finally getting the lay of the land; working in the healers’ tents when Makalaurë or Elros are carried in, wounded; the ruined city of Sirion, smoking and smoldering in the summer rain.  It is evening, and Elrond is running through infinity-cuts with a blunted sword until his bright form seems to leave the ghost of a figure-eight shining furiously on the air.  A few other soldiers are standing nearby, speaking amongst themselves, not paying him any heed, for which he is grateful.  At eighteen years of age, Elrond has fallen into the sort of sullen anger that would have been seen as childish in a human of his age and insolent in an elfling.  But with his strange blend of sharp Elvish vision and quick reflexes, and the slightly gawky, overfriendly bearing of the Secondborn, his temper makes most of the other elves keep a respectful distance.

Elrond’s moods always darken when the seasons change, and lately his whole nervous system feels like a rope pulled so tight that he could snap.  He runs laps around the camp for hours, cleans and sterilizes all of the healers’ equipment more often then necessary, refuses to join Makalaurë for any music lessons, and snarls at anyone who attempts to wish him a good morning.

He moves on to repeated underhand cuts against a bag of straw in the center of the training area.  It is over an hour until Maedhros had intended to meet him and Elros here for their lessons.  Lately, he has a recurring belief that if he trains hard enough with the sword, that if he takes all the right medicines and does all the right exercises and learns all the right skills, that he will _make it_ , that he will _get there_ , that there is a finish line beyond which lies something he cannot quite name.  Elros seems to fluctuate between admiration and exasperation at this, but after Elrond snapped at him and ran from the tent after he casually asked _how are you_ , has finally taken to respectful avoidance.

Wherever _there_ may be, it feels frustratingly far tonight.  As he runs through different styles of cuts, the makeshift dummy becomes every single elf in the entire Fëanorian camp in turn, save only his brother; and then he is attempting to behead in turn each of the Valar who put his father into the sky and left him here; and angrily kicking at the bag of straw which has now become his parents who sailed to Valinor instead of coming back for him; and now slashing his blade at Gender Itself and his body that he hardly recognizes anymore; and finally he is stabbing Ilúvatar Himself in his timeless omnipotent guts.

Elrond’s knees are trembling, and his legs seem to be pulsing louder than his heart.  He is running through the same sequence of strikes, again and again, splitting the cloth until straw strews the ground, in a frenzy so angry that he does not even pause when he feels his ankle twist beneath him, does not pause as the others disperse to their other tasks, does not notice the other elf watching.  The bag of straw has died many a violent death.  He feels he can hardly get any air into his lungs.

Elrond spins around at the sound of approaching footsteps, automatically pulling himself into a defensive stance, hands pulled back beside his hip, sword pointed upward, his grip on the sword-hilt unnecessarily tight.  When he sees that the newcomer is Maedhros, he does not immediately lower the blade.

Maedhros has not yet picked up a practice-blade of his own.  “That was an impressive show; and, something is troubling you.”

Elrond could lie that it is still the kinslaying that is troubling him, and Maedhros would have no choice but to let the matter drop.  “It’s nothing,” he says instead, spitting the words, caught in a stubborn determination to be unfriendly that he knows is of his own making.  He lowers the training-blade, still keeping his grip tight, and balances on one foot to roll the offending ankle in a slow circle above the ground – that injury, at least, does seem to be nothing.

Maedhros raises an eyebrow. “If you say so.  Though I fear that you’ll injure yourself, if you keep up like this.”

 “You can hardly blame me for training _more._ I don’t mind if it _hurts_ , I’m not – ”  _Not a nís_ , seems almost to hang on the air, and he furiously tries to pull his thoughts back inside his mind.  He knows that, for once, Maedhros isn’t the one he’s upset with, but he is too wound up in his own frustration to care.

“I was not questioning your pain tolerance.  But you’ll damage your ribs like that, and your lungs too, and it is harder to fight with a bruised rib – or a collapsed lung, for that matter.  I would not claim any parental authority, but you are my student and you fight in the guard of the people of whom I am still Lord, and you are under my care for as long as you dwell here.  Not to mention that if your family should see you with fractured ribs, they will say that I hurt you.”

Elrond blinks.  He feels his lungs have been jammed inside a tight box, and the base of ribcage is clicking ominously in a way that he has been trying to ignore.  But that is not what he had thought Maedhros was referring to.  “My family aren’t going to see me,” he says, trying to hide his surprise.  “Stop _saying_ things like that.  No one’s coming for me, and the roads will never be safe enough to send me away, and you know it.  Stop _lying_.”  He knows that he is being petty, and that the one thing he cannot accuse Maedhros of, is lying.  He knows that Maedhros knows that he knows this, and the drawn-out silence makes him feel so uncomfortable and childish that he finally says, “It’s not that I _mind_ training with the nissi,” just to break the silence.  He has heard more than one well-intentioned variation on this, of late: _t_ _he nissi fight as fierce as any warriors, and to be among them is no small honor!_

“I know.”

“They just look at me as though I’m not _me._   You don’t _understand_.  I just… I don’t like to be _looked at_.   I.  well.  Just.   sometimes.”  He feels himself flushing, lost for words.

“I feel I may, on occasion, have been able understand the experience of not wanting to be looked at,” Maedhros responds dryly, seeming utterly unperturbed by Elrond’s determination to be obstinate; Makalaurë would likely have scolded him for his temper and suggested that he return to his room.

Though the other’s smile, rare in itself, holds nothing but kindness, that quiet patience only fuels Elrond’s frustration.  “But I don’t have a _choice_.  It doesn’t feel right otherwise.  I can… hardly even do a _push-up_ without… them dragging at the ground.”  Admitting something so deeply personal about his body makes him flush deeply red and look away again.

Maedhros does not question the hyperbole.  “Of course.  I did not intend to reprimand you.  But as I said before: if you desire more appropriate clothing, you really only need ask.  It’s the texture and the type of fabric, and the angle.  The plant that is used to spin this sort of material, does not grow around here.”  It takes Elrond a moment to raise his head and realize that Maedhros is not mocking him and is also holding out what looks to be a small shirt. 

He stares at it apprehensively and then reaches out and snatches it.  The fabric is very smooth.  “Where did you get this?”

“One of my soldiers had an extra.  The first one burned with his body.  I thought he would have been about your size.  His wife was glad for it to be redistributed; I was discreet.”

“Did you kill him?” Elrond asks sullenly, irritated that Maedhros is determined to ruin his bad mood by empathizing and offering him a gift, and desperate to change the subject.

“One of your mother’s guards did.”  Unlike his brother, Maedhros has never tries to gloss over anything that has happened.  “You can think what you want of its original owner.  Hurting yourself out of hatred at what others have done to you, is never helpful in the long run.  That much I _do_ understand.”

Elrond hesitates, unsure if the biting feeling in his chest is embarrassment or nervousness or his chest shoved painfully tight into his ribs.  “Why do _you_ care?”  Too many emotions are battling with his attempts to keep his voice low, and he winces at its shrillness.

Though he immediately wishes he hadn’t spoken, Maedhros seems to consider the question legitimate.  “Well, I was lucky: I was born in the land of the Gods!  The tree-light made a lot of things possible, that are no more.  We would wander through the gardens of Lórien for casual enjoyment.”  The noise he makes is not quite a laugh.  “It is at least in part my fault, that you were not born with such opportunities.  I cannot bring you to the Valar and ask for their help, as could have been done when they were our neighbors.  But if there _is_ even a small way in which I can make life less uncomfortable for you, of course it is my place do so.”

“When you say,” Elrond begins slowly, incredulously, “that _you_ were lucky…”

“You see!  Someday, maybe, if that is your desire, it might shock some young elf to think you could ever have been mistaken for a nís.”  But Maedhros takes pity on Elrond’s uncomfortable silence, and continues, “Don’t sleep in it.  Take it off when you can.  Stretch your shoulders.  Listen to your body.  I’ll see you back here for your lesson in ten minutes.”

Elrond stares at him for a moment, eyes wide, and then grins and nods, darting away back toward the tent that he shares with his brother.

Back in the tent, he squirms, his elbows buckling into his shoulders as he attempts to wrestle the fabric over his head.  The position is so painfully exposed.  If Elros were in his place he imagines that he might have jokingly punched his twin in the stomach by now.  For at least ten harrowing minutes, he is convinced that his brother is going to walk in and do exactly that.

After much wrangling, he looks down at himself: it isn’t particularly visually pleasing, like his shirtless twin jumping into the sea with every well-defined muscle visible; but it is a powerful feeling, all the same like being a dragon or a sea-monster, like the first time he was allowed to wear real chainmail and felt invincibly strong as a warrior in one of the Great Battles.  The tension that has been coursing through his body seems to settle like leaves in the bottom of a pool, a sudden stillness.

With no mirror, nor glass window like those he faintly remembers from his childhood, he knows his own appearance only by looking down from above, and by the strange flatness of his body parallel to the ground when he does one pushup, and two more; never has Elrond been so excited to be _in_ his body and move _as_ his body.  He feels less that he is covering up some facet of himself, and more that he is transforming as once his mother had become a bird.

He remembers that he was supposed to return for his lesson, and pulls his tunic back on.  For the entire walk back to the training-area, he is convinced that every passing elf is staring at him, and keeps nervously adjusting his posture, though no one actually seems to spare him more than a passing glance.

The frustration that had been seething through him is jolting through the confusion of this sudden turn of events, not forgotten, but he can’t help feeling tentatively hopeful, any more than he can keep from nervously rolling his shoulders around and twirling his sword from hand to hand like a baton, in the way that Maedhros so frequently reprimands him for.  “I’m sorry I’m late.  Um, it took a while to get on.” 

“It’s quite alright – you didn’t have to see the first time I tried to tie my bootlaces with one hand.  But, I think you’ve had more than enough cutting practice for today – we may as well move on to sparring.  Where _is_ your brother?”

Elros joins them soon after, a bit of seaweed caught in his damp hair.  “I came by earlier,” he explains, not sounding at all apologetic, “but I saw the Vala Makar Himself wreaking havoc on a training-dummy, and thought it better not to interfere.”

 _“Is that alright?”_ Elros does not intentionally add, _literally everything offends you, lately,_ but his mind is open enough that Elrond hears it anyway, and feels slightly ashamed.

_“Better than ‘Little Lúthien.’”_

Though even two-against-one he and his brother are not able to disarm their foster-father, and despite the overwhelming ache in his shoulders, there is a leaping joy in fighting back-to-back with his twin, an imperfect, crooked, aching joy that makes _finally getting there_ not feel like such an impossible feat.

 

 

 

## Summer

 

“What is in your tea?” Maedhros asks, gesturing down at the dark sludge that Elrond had been sipping from a clay mug, trying not to draw attention to the way he is puckering his lips at its bitterness.

“Nettle roots, ashwagandha, pine-bark.  Um, fleeceflower and sarsaparilla.”  He swills the liquid nervously around in its vessel and wonders belatedly if he is going to be reprimanded for wasting precious medicine.  “From the healers’ apothecary, but I took nothing that we were low on,” he adds defensively, though he had made a point of waiting to borrow the materials while the other healers were occupied.  It wasn’t stealing, he’d told himself: he just didn’t want to be asked about it.  He had taken their last precious bottle of yohimbe extract, as well, but he does not mention that – the healers never use it anyway, he had reassured himself.  The almost-illicit nature of his recent botanical experiments brings a shiver of excitement just as it carries a tiny wrench of guilt.

Maedhros tilts his head to the side thoughtfully, staring down at the murky liquid as though parsing a riddle.  “That is a potent medicine,” he says finally, “and you are a more than competent healer, and so I trust you not to harm yourself in this, or to take anything that you would not give to another who came to yourself for aid.  But Sight and maia blood though you may have, I would suggest you not be disappointed if your plants have not miraculously changed the entire form of your hröa within a week.  Estë could have raised her hand over such a potion, and it would have done her bidding; but we do not have such blessings in this land.”

Elrond had not acknowledged his intent aloud, but as clearly as it is written in his choice of plant materials, it seems fruitless to deny it.  “I will be careful,” he promises, and does not mention that this is already his fourth cup of the day.

Maedhros nods seriously.  “Ginger would help circulate energy downwards, as well as improve absorption.  It has some influence on hormonal levels as well.  If you harvest one of the barrels alongside the kitchen, you can tell anyone who protests that I told you to do it.  And puncture-vine is good for building strength in general; as well as _‘infertility or impotence where obstruction is due to an excess of yielding-energy in the reproductive organs,’_ as one of our old books so poetically phrased it.  I do wish you could have seen the libraries of Tirion – or even Himring, for that matter.”  By the time Elrond was twelve, he had read every book in their meagre library at least twice; their semi-nomadic life does not allow for much written tradition.  “And an honest word of caution, loathe as I am to say it: for your own sake and everyone else’s, do not marry your girlfriend by accident.  Explaining to your family how you came to be such a devout Fëanorian is one thing, but trying to explain that you took too many aphrodisiacs and bound yourself to a Fëanorian until the end of Arda, is quite another.”

“She’s not my – ”  Elrond sighs.  From the look on his face, Maedhros looks like he wants to argue this point even less than he does.  “Which one is puncture-vine?”

“The crawling vetch-like plant on the hill, with the yellow flower, between the healers’ tents and the river.  I would show you, if you like.  But you may want to get some shoes first.”

Lately, Elrond is almost constantly barefoot; he likes the feel of the earth beneath his feet, of the land speaking to him.  But stumbling up the sandy slope without shoes, he gets a few deeply spiked seed-pods stuck into his foot.  Balancing on one foot and holding the sole of the other with one hand, he extracts the little hoof-shaped capsules, one by one, the tips of their thorns made red with his blood.  They are so sharp and secure that it almost does not hurt at all.  He remembers feeling this way once, after stepping on a handful of sewing-pins, fine metal stuck through callus that he could hardly feel.

“Some of the Avari use those as weapons,” Maedhros mentions conversationally, almost cheerfully.  “Only when dipped in the proper poison, of course.  I _did_ warn you.”

“But we make _tea_ from them?” he asks incredulously.   A few drops of thin blood stain the sole of his foot.

“Tea, yes, or a powder if you have the patience grind them small enough.  We don’t eat them whole.  I imagine you _have_ realized by now that Fëanorians do not actually eat bramble-thorns and live toads and lick the blood from our swords and breathe fire like dragons.”

“My mother also told me that you had teeth like an orc.”  As he unloads the cloth bags he had carried with him for harvest, Elrond begrudging slips into the sandals he had been carrying in the pack at his back.

Maedhros laughs wickedly at this, showing all his teeth.  “Not precisely like an orc.  Orcs, you see, have a unique jaw structure more similar to a warg – the canines are higher up.  These are really just elvish teeth, made into points…” He continues to lecture on orcish skeletal differences while Elrond collects careful handfuls of the puncture-vine pods, which he sees now have fallen beneath the creeping, vetch-like plant that covers most of the hillside.

As they carry their baskets of prickly cargo back to the apothecary, Maedhros says carefully, “There are songs that have the magic right in them, to change the pitch of a voice, much more effectively than your herbal concoction, if that is something you seek.  I understand your reasoning for not wanting to sing with Makalaurë, but it may help, if you think you can bear it.  Sing them with him, sing them as low as you can, and keep practicing.”

“Do you think he…”  He is usually known as the articulate twin, now frustrated by his own sudden loss of words.

“Can you trust my brother to continue to value your wellbeing over his Oath?  I hope so and doubt so in equal measure.  But I will promise you, from experience, that you _can_ trust that if you say you are a nér, he will believe you, and treat you as such.  That is the thing about Fëanorians, I think, that gets forgotten when they say we are no better than Moringotto: for the Enemy and his servants would tear apart your very sense of self, if only for the joy of it.”

Elrond suddenly remembers the voice in his dream, which he alternates between pondering overmuch and obstinately trying to forget, saying, _my queen, my queen_.  The dream had returned on two more occasions, and he had taken to walking into Elros’s dreams intentionally in order to avoid it.  He shudders.  “Thank you.  I… would _you_ speak to Makalaurë for me?”  This is, he realizes as he speaks, the first time he can remember trusting the elder of his foster-fathers over the younger.

“Some might say that it is better for you to practice expressing yourself aloud.”  Maedhros pauses.  “But difficult as you may find it to believe, I too have been young and shy.  Please, for your own sake, speak to your _self_.  Say it out loud – _I am a nér –_ and pay attention to how it makes you feel.  Accustom yourself to it.  Make sure it is the word that fits you best.  And yes, I will speak to Makalaurë, because I’ve caused more than enough grief in your life and it’s the least that I can do.”

 

*

 

 _How do you ever expect to kill me if you don’t learn to wield a sword?_ Elrond is not sure when precisely this became a joke.  But many mornings, this is how he awakens, sleep-eyed and groggy in a way that is distinctly linked to his mortal heritage and vaguely amusing to his foster-fathers.  _Arien has been in the sky for over half an hour… how do you ever expect to kill me if you don’t train?_

But now the summer rainstorms have turned the leaves a deep, vibrant green, and Maedhros finds Elrond gathering some of the strange new plants that have been sprouting up in the meadows just beyond the edge of their camp, tosses a training-sword at his feet, and calls: “We’ve been looking all over for you!  How do you ever intend to kill me if you skip your lessons?”

And Elrond actually _laughs_ aloud as he fills the deep pockets of his robes with samples of the plant’s bright yellow flowers, grabbing the sword and lunging at his foster-father, who deflects his shot as casually as swatting a fly from the air.

“I’ll meet you and your brother in the training ring in ten minutes, if you can track him down.”

They’ve been given more freedom this summer than ever before, permitted to leave the confines of their now-more-permanent settlement and explore the surrounding territory alone, provided that they carry appropriate weaponry and tell their foster-fathers where they are going and when they will return.  It has been over a decade since the twins have had any real thought of escape; and when Elros goes swimming, alone or with a few other elves of the camp, he no longer makes any fanciful claim to see the Isle of Balar in the distance.  His twin approaches him from a long way off shore, a tiny speck growing ever closer, having befriended a whale and two dolphins.

“You told Makalaurë that you would not to go so far, or for so long,” Elrond reprimands softly.  “You didn’t even bring your sword!  What if there was another attack – what if you tried to swim back, but there were enemies blocking you from the camp – what if…”

Elros pats the neck of the whale affectionately, like a favorite horse, and bows his head slightly to the creatures as he clamors out of the water, the small waves of the bay crashing around his knees.  “They won’t let anything happen to me!” he laughs.  _Uinen_ would not let such a thing happen to me, of that I am certain.”  Then he meets his twin’s eyes, and seems to realize his true fear.  “I’m not going to leave,” he says, more gently this time, “that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?  I’m not Mother; I’m not going to jump into the ocean and leave you forever.”  He retrieves his crumpled clothing from underneath a few nearby rocks.  “Nor would I travel to Balar without you, nor without telling our fathers my intent first.  You’re not the only one who loves them, El.”  He shakes his wet hair like a dog, sea-spray flying everywhere, and ties it hastily back with a piece of string in a haphazard manner that will undoubtedly make Makalaurë cringe.

“I know.”  For a few weeks, Elrond had continuously kept re-naming himself after whatever medicinal plant he was most interested in at the moment, until Elros had taken to arbitrarily referring to him by the name of whichever plant was in closest proximity.  Frustrated with his own inconsistency, he had reverted back to the nickname both twins have always used.  But the fact that his brother is not jokingly referring to him as _Sea-holly_ or _Beach-grass_ is in itself indicative of his mood.

Elros pulls his sheathed sword out from where it had been hidden beneath a heap of rocks and smooth driftwood.  “I know my duties here, and I keep my word.  I said I would take the overnight watch tonight, and I will.  I said I would come back to train with you, and I’m _sorry_ I’m late, alright?  You are not the only one who needs space.”  But there is nothing particularly apologetic in his tone, and he keeps his mind closed to his twin as they return to camp in sullen silence.

Elrond has been arguing with Makalaurë more, too: lately everything feels even _more_ wildly, bitterly unfair than even it had when he was first taken captive by the Fëanorians – the act of building a life for himself, when he knows that everything he has grown to love and hold dear, could be at any moment pulled away by an unbreakable oath and more needless murder.  He hardly knows whether he would rather drop sardonic references to his foster-parents’ murderous tendencies, or embrace them and beg them not to leave him, and compromises by making underhanded biting references to kinslayings and the inevitable failure of the great War while continuously making healing teas for anyone who is willing to take them.  He spends nearly all of his free time shut away in his tent writing his own books, now that he has none left to read.  _You’re worse than Maedhros_ , Makalaurë tells him, with a peculiar sort of affectionate exasperation that he had never before seen directed at himself.

Later that day, he asks about the strange new flower, its bright yellow blooms softly wilting against its jagged-toothed leaves as he hangs it to dry in the three-walled wooden shelter they have built behind the kitchen for such a purpose, his foster-fathers bent over a pile of paperwork at a nearby table.

“Yes, it grew in the meadows south of Tirion.  I… have never seen it in the sunlight.”  Makalaurë stares at the flowers as though seeing a ghost.  “Plants come, sometimes, right when we most need them,” he continues, “and sometimes when we least expect them.  Yarrow growing out of an impossibly stony slope when you have a wound that will not stop bleeding, for example.”

“The damiana does indeed come right when it is needed,” Maedhros says, and from the sharp bite in his tone and the harsh look that Makalaurë casts in his brother’s direction, Elrond realizes that they must have had another argument.  “If our curse should reach many more of the medicine-plants, we’ll have nothing left for healing but your lifeless, twisted healing-songs.”  A blight had taken almost all of the cannabis this year – a wet, moldy disease that silently at the flowers form the inside out.  A dry spring and wet summer had withered most of the poppies, and their carefully-saved henbane seed had refused to germinate.  That it is specifically the painkilling medicines that have failed, makes people talk: _it is our Curse,_ they say, _the Valar are saying that we deserve to hurt._

And he is correct, too, though no one else dares say it out loud: Makalaurë’s songs can easily move the heart to grief in an instant, but they do not seem to have much physical healing power in them anymore.  Or if they do, it’s a weary and sorrowful sort of healing, like Nienna’s tears on the roots of the Trees.

“Well, you two bitter nihilists can go on spitting cynicism at one another, if you like,” Makalaurë answers brightly, a dreadful, false smile twisting his face, and the anger and sorrow in his voice seem to hum like a tangible presence on the air.  “But Elros and I will go work on strengthening the song-barriers, and I _do_ hope my hateful music shall keep us all alive and protected for one more night.”

Elros looks between his twin and their foster-parents, seemingly torn between siding with a son of Fëanor and resentment at his earlier argument with Elrond.  “Can I try to make one out of swords, this time?” he asks Makalaurë hopefully, intentionally closing his mind off to his twin’s probing.  Makalaurë has been teaching them how to sing so that the hedge around their camp will seem to rustle and glisten as though with the bows of a hundred archers, buying some time for actual archers to ready themselves in case of attack.  This kind of mirage is perfect for ever-dreaming Elros, who has to be talked out of creating whole fantasy armies to surround the camp.  The song-barriers set protectively around their compound are a combination of camouflage and defensive traps, the most recent including a massive spray of water that will rise up from a small stream just beyond the hedge at Elrond’s command.

Their chatter as they stride away leave together holds and unnatural sort of cheer, like the bright yellow of the damiana amid the browns and greys of their dwellings.

Elrond is still trying to conceptualize _I have never seen it in the sunlight._   “I cannot picture that,” he ventures finally.  “A time before sunlight.  Seeing something in sunlight, for the first time.  Seeing the sun for the first time.”  He hesitates.  “Did you _really_ see the first time the sun rose?  Elros wouldn’t have.  He sleeps like a mortal!  If father’s star had risen first in the morning and not the evening, I think he’d have slept through that as well.”

“El!” Maedhros exclaims, seeming more amused than shocked.  But then his gaze hardens.  “Do you know…” It is very hard for Elrond to meet the fey light in his eyes: a different sort of jadedness than he is accustomed to.  “When I first saw Arien in the sky… for a moment I thought it meant there was _hope_ for us?”

With his Sight, for a second Elrond thinks he can see a flash of it, in his mind’s eye, from the other elf’s view: a breathtakingly beautiful light rising over endless slopes of stone that double and echo drunkenly in his vision.  He realizes suddenly why he should not have asked.  Worried that he should not have spoken, he pretends to be very occupied with setting the last of the fresh plant matter into a clay vessel and setting a kettle of water over the nearby cooking-fire, because with his Sight the bitter _emptiness_ he Sees in Maedhros is more piercing than a knife.

But the older elf does not make any external sign of distress, his voice light in comparison to the flash of memory that Elrond has just caught.  “When the lights mingled, it was like a shower of rainbows all at once.  Under Laurelin the lights were at once softer and brighter than they are now – as though there were _more_ colors than there are now, colors I could not describe to you.  Textures were sharper.  Everything looked more _alive._ The flowers of that plant you have there, almost seemed to glow as Laurelin itself – not unrelated to its use in medicine, in a way – a deficiency of inner fire.  A _stimulant restorative_ , as the old books would call it, _‘for those elves for whom the Light does not reach their eyes.’_   It was a common plant to take before a long journey, or during times of great stress: to improve endurance, to protect against weariness and wasting and fading – and, yes, testosterone deficiency, since I can see you’re trying very hard not to ask.  And unlike some plants that I’ve seen you throwing back at truly alarming rates, this one would be difficult to overdose.  Can you believe, though,” he adds very softly, lecture-tone fading to something between grief and wonder, that we actually thought we knew what words like _stress_ or _weariness_ actually _meant_?”  He shakes his head slightly.

The question seems rhetorical, but Elrond says, “Yes.”  Maedhros looks up at him in surprise, so he presses on, surprised at his own earnestness: “I know that things could be much worse than they are now – no, don’t correct me, I have shelter and food and safety and family – and still I think I can feel, just by looking at it, the kind of brightness that is in this plant, the kind of sorrow and darkness it could drive away.”  But now he bites his lip.  “I have the wrong Gift, don’t I?” he asks quietly, watching the water in the kettle slowly begin to gurgle over the crackling flames.  “Elros knows just who he is,” Elrond tells the boiling water.  “He knows everything about himself.  He knows he’s a man, like our father, even though there’s nothing about his body that says one way or the other.  He knows what he _means_ , when he says he’s a man, when he says he wants to be a king of men, and I can’t explain what I mean, when I say I’m a not a nís.  I want everything he wants, in a way, but I like _healing_ , I…”  He picks up the heavy pot, and pours it over the plants in their vessel, watching the heat of the water make the green leaves brighten as they wilt.

“Surely my brother _has_ forced you to read those terribly dry scrolls on the Laws and Customs of the Eldar?  There is no formal difference between what a nér and a nís can and cannot do, and so it is illogical to think about being a nér as somehow the presence of certain hobbies, or as the absence of níshood.”

“That makes it worse.”

“I take your point; it’s a maze that is easy to be lost in.”  Maedhros seems to stare straight through the stack of papers on the table before him, jotting a few more notes onto the page and then crossing them out again.  “When I was your age, I was constantly compared to my father in all things, and so I equated being a nér with being the greatest metalsmith of all time, convinced that if I were not as fantastically talented as he, I could not really be a nér.  But my grandfather, my mother’s father, gave me copper to work with, and said, _maybe you were only using the wrong materials._   My father gave me a sword he had forged, and I learned to best him with it – for joy, before even I knew how I could put such a skill to evil.”  Now he twirls his pen in his hand, over and over, an action that Elrond often sees in himself when he is searching for the right words.  “Being a nér is not the act of _appearing_ like someone else’s understanding of what it means to be a nér, just as being a king is not the act of wearing a crown.  And if that is what you think you want to do – to fight in great battles lead elves, to be their lord, _and_ to be a healer at the same time – then I imagine you will find your own way to do it, with the materials that work best for you.”  He pauses for a moment, then adds wryly: “Though there are, of course, some obvious flaws in the way that the Laws and Customs are presented.”

“Yes,” Elrond agrees, trying to sound academic, though his heart is leaping with pride, to hear his foster-father who so rarely opens up to anyone, speak so personally with him.  “I can tell just by the way it is worded, that it was written by a nér.”

Maedhros’s eyes gleam at that, as though this is precisely the answer he’d hoped for.  “Go on.”

“Well, it’s all good to say that the nissi delight in dancing and in weaving cloth, or that neri cook but nissi make bread, or that neri are usually warriors but nissi can be if they want to.  But all the Eldar have always have _kings_ , and the songs are full of examples of, well… If Lúthien were a nér, I don’t think her father would have locked her away in a tower.  King Turukáno would not have been so begrudging to let his _brother_ leave his city.  It’s convenient and all, that firstborn royalty all happen to be neri, but what _would_ have happened if…” he trails off, wondering once again if he has said the wrong thing.

“Convenient indeed,” Maedhros agrees, with that strange, fey smile that Elrond has only ever seen on Makalaurë.  “Do you know, I think that is why my father named me as he did: whoever I grew up to be, I was always meant to be his heir.  He wanted to make sure everyone was absolutely clear on that point.  There were some vile rumors, for a while, of course.”

Elrond winces.  He thinks, not for the first time, that for all he loves to learn the songs of life in the great fallen elvish cities and fortresses, growing up away from social conventions and polite society has offered him a freedom of expression that he would not otherwise have enjoyed.  “If this is what Makalaurë means by _spitting cynicism,_ I’m glad of it,” he says suddenly.  “Elros and I used to share _everything._ And now – ”

Maedhros is still fidgeting with his quill, but his perked ears show that he is still listening intently.

“Everyone loves Elros.  He’s witty, he’s friendly, he – ”  Elros has engaged in varying degrees of relationships with all of the younger nissi in their camp, and quite a few neri as well, claiming that if he is a man he should not be held to the monogamy of the Eldar; Maedhros is probably well aware of this, but he isn’t going to hear it from Elrond.  “He wants to be kind, and I know it’s not me, but he never has time for me anymore, he says I’m…”   _Insufferable pessimist,_ is one phrase that has come up, _cynical idiot_ another, both presumably borrowed from Makalaurë.

“Do you know, my little twin brothers went through such a phase.  They had their own language, whose rules were so intrinsic to their own thought process that even my linguist father could not translate it.”  This is only the second time Elrond can remember the other elf mentioning his youngest brothers, but now his tone is more fond than bitter.  “But around their fortieth year – childhood moving differently for elves – they were a terror to themselves and everyone around, forever goading us into choosing between them.  Within a decade they were inseparable once more.”  He returns to his writing again, but keeps his gaze focused on Elrond to show that he is not being dismissive.  “Adolescence is an awful, confusing mess for _all_ the children of Ilúvatar.  I would not worry about it overmuch.”

 

*

 

Elrond has taken to jogging laps around the camp every evening, past the neat rings of smaller tents and more permanent wooden structures that have sprung up as they have managed to remain stationary for several years now.  He keeps running, he keeps saying to himself: _if I can do this, I will be strong enough, I will be a real nér._ And though he knows he _shouldn’t_ think so, still the thought keeps intruding, and he keeps running.  The guards on their watch-posts in the hedge have grown accustomed to him darting past, occasionally pausing to catch his breath, and sometimes they offer a few words of encouragement.  And Maedhros was right, too, that when he binds his chest properly, the action no longer makes his ribs hurt so much that he could weep.  Though, he suspects he may have twisted his ankle again at some point in the past hour; it throbs unpleasantly while he stretches it against the base of a nearby tree.  Some distance away, he catches sight of his two foster-fathers sitting close together by a fire, speaking in soft voices.  He pauses, and then silently doubles back to watch them from behind the wooden walls of the nearby armory.

Maedhros has a smoking pipe and a glass jar held carefully between his knees, and appears to be scraping at the inside of the pipe with a stick.  In the cloudy night, it is hard to tell where his fiery hair ends and the flames of the campfire began, and its brightness makes the contrasting shadows around his face as dark as caves in stone.

“My proud brother, that is an impressive new low for you.”  Makalaurë is fixing a broken string on a harp that is almost as tall as he is, brow furrowed in concentration.  A few empty wine-jugs are scattered at their feet.

“On the contrary,” Maedhros responds, without looking up.  “This may be the least shameful thing I’ve done all century.”  He catches a particularly large piece of clotted hash and ashes, and scrapes it into the jar.  Seeming satisfied, he refills the pipe with crumbled dry leaves of damiana and smears the blackened hash on top.

“Does that help,” Makalaurë says, more statement than question, with something that might be pity or disgust.  But as he completes his task and comes to settle on the bench between his brother and his harp, leaning his cheek gently against Maedhros’s shoulder, Elrond suspects the later.

Maedhros lights the pipe from the flame of a nearby torch, and does not answer.  He closes his eyes lightly for a moment.  A tiny ripple of peace seems to pass across his features, the fire in his eyes going still for a moment, like leaves settling at the bottom of a pool.  From his hiding-place, Elrond catches the calming, bitter scent of damiana smoke on the air.

“You and El have been closer lately,” Makalaurë says carefully, plucking a few experimental notes on the newly-mended instrument.  Elrond notes the pause after _El_ , the open space where a name-ending should sit.  The others have questioned him about it more than once, and generally taken to simply calling him _you._ But though he frequently tries out other names in his head, they never seem to fit: too presumptuous, too grand, too long, too different from his brother’s.

Maedhros waves the pipe around in a noncommittal gesture.  “I am taking El with me,” he says.  “On our next scouting trip.  This new silence is ominous, and I would have us determine where our foes have drawn back to.  And the medicine-stores have worn painfully thin: it will be a good exercise in botanical identification.”

“Have you asked him?”  Elrond feels a strange, leaping in his chest.  He hadn’t realized how much he had worried that he was not being referred to as _him_ outside of his own earshot, until he sees that this is not the case.

“No.”  Maedhros shrugs, and smokes again.

“Elros will be upset.  He is rather protective.  You must have noticed.”

“Well, he can come as well, as long as he promises not to disobey any direct orders regarding wargs or dragons – but, that is my point precisely.  El is three minutes older and, I think, absolutely willing to use that status if necessary.  I _do_ know something about being the stubborn older sibling.”

Makalaurë’s face softens.  “I feel it too,” he says softly, as though answering some unspoken statement.  “When you see yourself in the children, and you remember how it was, to believe that you can grow to be the person you think you are meant to be.  If you _couldn’t_ remember how it felt – that blissful optimism – it wouldn’t hurt so much to see it scattered like leaves on the wind.”  Makalaurë plucks a few more notes on his harp, as though to calm himself, and the music itself seems to frame his face like a crown, blending into the not-quite-melody of his spoken words like its own song of power.  “And now I feel I would do anything, _anything_ to make sure their stories do not end like ours.”  His tone holds more command than sorrow.

In the long moment of silence that follows, Maedhros does not contradict this or make any dismissive comment, and Elrond almost wishes that he would, if only because with his Sight he can feel both elves’ sorrow like a stormcloud, punctuated with strange beams of Makalaurë’s music like lightning.  But when Maedhros speaks, there is no emotion in his voice at all.  “When you are young, you think finding what it means to be your body, finding a place for your own hröa in the orma of Arda, that is the most important thing.”  There is a pause in which Makalaurë looks like he might interrupt, but Maedhros continues speaking to the fire as though he does not notice.  “It is incredibly easy to suffer, and to have hope, when you think your identity is something to be proud of.  And _He_ held it against me, something awful, as well you know; he would say, _Queen of the Noldor_.  But I thought: _I am a nér, I am a king; and I am a king because I can hold my own;_ _I am a nér because I am not a thrall, and so my identity is my own to claim and name;_ _I am a nér because I am the eldest son of Fëanáro, and that is a thing to take pride in; I am a nér precisely because I will not bow to this enemy who says I am not._ But now, it is we who are the enemy.”

Makalaurë has let his hands fall away from his harp, head still leaned against his brother’s shoulder.  Even from some distance away, still pressed against the wall of the armory, Elrond Sees the fragment of the kinslaying caught in that last chord, the burning towers of Sirion and faint echoes of keening wails mingling into the hiss and crackle of the real campfire now before him.  It doesn’t bring the fright and revulsion that it might have when he was a child, now, only a desperate desire for everything to be _well_ again.  If only there were some healing herb that could undo everything that had happened, could save his birth-parents and their lost city and his foster-parents alike.  Elrond is a healer, before aught else, and for a moment the gaping reality of everything he will never be able to heal, feels like it is swallowing him whole.

But Maedhros is still speaking, his voice so low that Elrond can hardly catch the words, in that same flat tone as though he is reciting a treatise on someone else’s life.  “It’s all very easy, until you realize that, nís or nér, you still never stood a chance – there was _never_ a world in which you, your own self, could have succeeded – that you needn’t have bothered at all – ”

“Maitimo,” Makalaurë’s voice is surprisingly earnest even as Maedhros winces away from the name, “I won’t hear another _word_ of this.  Hope or no hope, Doom or no Doom, no matter how far we have fallen or may yet fall, of course identity _matters_.  I am so glad that you are my brother; and though well I know how unfair it is to them, I am glad that the peredhil are here, as well, if only to remind us of what it was, to have hope.”

Maedhros snorts, seeming to emerge from his reverie, and relights his pipe.  “What is it, precisely, that we are meant to hope for?  That _day shall come again_?”  But his contempt does not reach his eyes.

Makalaurë winces, unanswering, head still resting against his brother’s shoulder.

To eavesdrop on such a private conversation feels wrong, now that these are his foster-parents and not the abstract monsters of whom he had been warned by the mother he can no longer picture.  Elrond considers stealing away, hesitates, and then makes an elaborate show of leaning against a nearby tree and letting his footsteps fall heavily as he comes to settle down by the fire.

Startled, Makalaurë sits up suddenly very straight, rearranging his face into a thin smile that does not meet his eyes.  “How was your run?” Maedhros gives him a piercing look, as though trying to guess how much he has overheard.

In answer, Elrond settles down on the ground by the fire in front of them, hoping that his too-elaborate show of being out of breath is believable enough that they will not realize how long he had been standing there.  He reaches for the last still half-full bottle of wine.  “Wonderful.  I’m so thirsty, may I – ”

“You are fortunate, then, that there is a jug of water just behind you,” Makalaurë chastises gently.  “And yes – yes, you may, but water first.”  The Peredhil have been allowed liberal amounts of wine from a young age, as is the norm with Noldorin elflings, but Makalaurë has seen Secondborn die of dehydration and seems to harbor a deep-seated fear of exactly how mortal their mortal blood makes them.  “We were just talking about plans for another expedition into the Forest – are you interested in coming along?  Your skills with botany have proved invaluable.”  He pauses.  “And it hardly seems necessary, that social taboos around the role of a healer should keep you from seeing as much of the world as your brother does.  If you should desire to come only as a scout, that choice is open to you.”

Elrond sips his water slowly: it began to taste differently, after he learned to speak with the spring where they fill their buckets, animated, as though he can feel the liquid meeting and communicating with every cell in his body.  “Thank you,” he says at last, “I would like that.”

“I have a proposition for you,” Maedhros puts in, and his voice has once more regained the patience and composure of a parent or teacher.  “There is a plant that I think you might find beneficial, and I know it to grow in that region of the forest where we will be travelling, but I am not going to tell you what it is called, or what it looks like.  And we shall see whether your Sight agrees with my thought.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then the mistake is mine: I have never known you to be wrong.”  It is true: on at least one occasion, another elf had been staunchly trying to hide an infected wound, insisting that it was nothing of consequence, until Elrond had found himself almost involuntarily reaching for a jar of goldenseal whenever the other was nearby.

Makalaurë has been softly playing a few notes on his harp, frowning as though listening for something beyond the others’ hearing.  He tightens one string, and then tries again.  “Will you stay a while, and sing with us?” he requests, putting a tiny bit of pressure into _us_ in that specific commanding way of his that does not give Maedhros an opportunity to back out.  “I will stop if you tell me to.”

Elrond has found that the more mastery he gains over his own voice, the less likely Makalaurë’s songs are to bring on his Sight in sudden and painful ways.  The songs Makalaurë has been teaching him make his throat ache, and on one occasion made his voice so hoarse that Elros had asked if he was ill.  But sitting here, caught between the satisfying weariness in his limbs and the light of the silmaril-star brightening the sky, and the love and grief and pity warring against each other in his abdomen at the conversation he’s just overheard, nothing could be more appealing than sharing music with his foster-fathers.  He nods.

The hymn that Makalaurë chooses is in praise of Estë, sung in rounds on progressively lower keys, so that each time they repeat the chorus, it vibrates slightly lower in his throat.  It is rare, that Elrond hears Maedhros sing, and though he pauses periodically to smoke again from his pipe, making his voice even more coarse, still his voice melds with Makalaurë’s in a deeply harmonious way that speaks clearly to their many centuries of singing together.

As the evening stretches on, Elros slips in quietly to sit by his side.  And for a few moments, with his brother and his foster-fathers around him and the passive crackle as the fire burns low, and the star that is his father watching over them, for all the weariness caught in his chest, Elrond thinks he has never felt so content.

 

 

 

## Autumn

 

Elros assures Maedhros that he will try, to the best of his ability and as circumstances permit, not to attack any dragons without explicit permission.  From the smirk that dances around the corners of his twin’s mouth, Elrond strongly suspects that he is already considering their foster-fathers’ aversion to oath-taking as an excuse to bend _to the best of his ability_ exactly as far as he desires to.  Seven elves have come on this particular expedition, healers to gather and scouts to watch for enemy forces, with Maedhros at the lead.  The trees of the Taur-im-Duinath to the west of their camp are tangled with ivy and hung with thick beards of usnea; they keep to the perimeter of the forest, where goldenseal and sarsaparilla grow in abundance, and the canopy is not so thick that they cannot see the sun pass overhead.

Periodically, Elrond climbs one of the taller trees to survey the land ahead.  It falls to Nornonis to dig careful roots of wild geraniums and fill baskets with elderberries, while he and Elros scout ahead, and though he knows he cannot be everything at once, still he feels a pang as he watches the only role he’s performed for so much of his life.

The wind swaying the tops of the pines makes the bottom drop out of his stomach, not altogether unpleasantly, as though he is flying.  He can See their camp from here, invisible but for a ripple of the songs of his and Makalaurë’s making, like the swell of unbroken waves rolling in a sea of meadows and shrubbery.  “Fires in the distance,” he reports, after he shimmies back down to the ground, “four leagues to the North,” he reports back, “red as dragon-fire.  The whole northern borders of the northern forest are dotted with them, but almost as though they are moving?” he ends uncertainly.

“More likely Balrogs.  What more can you tell me?”

“There is a clearing in the forest, some ways to the west, with the same sort of magic around it that we use to hide our own camp – most likely an Avari settlement, as you told me.  The land between here and the sea is entirely clear.  No orcs – no deer, for that matter, and very few birds.”

Telumbion gives a similar report, after stealing ahead into the forest: the occasional nervous badger or fox, but none of the Enemy’s creatures are to be seen, save for a few week-old prints of orc-boots, long gone, all headed north as though pulled there by a magnet.  They camp in silence, without fire, that night, half-buried in shrubbery and wrapped in their cloaks, the late-summer air hanging thickly around them with the smell of leaf-mold.  Above him, as he lies awake, Elrond watches the tops of the trees dancing above him in a wind that does not reach into the undergrowth.  Lately, it is harder and harder to sleep: a jittering, anxious energy continually building in the core of his ribs.  Eventually he offers to take over his brother’s watch, staring instead into the forest around him, attuning his ears to each new sound of the forest, the rustle of leaves in the wind and trickle of water in a distant spring.

The next morning, hand held loosely around the hilt of his sheathed sword, he hums a prayer of thanks to Yavanna under his breath, standing guard beside the healers as they fill deep baskets with elderberries.  The others have gone on ahead, following the a suspicious trail of spider-threads and the bones of deer.  None of the elderflowers nearest to their camp had bloomed this year – _it is our curse,_ some said again – and, delighted by the way he feels his soft song meet the brightness of the purple berries, relieved that they will have enough medicine to bring back, Elrond’s focus drifts away from the surrounding trees and into his song, only wanting the bushes to know how grateful he is –

All at once, there comes strange scraping of metal on wood: Elros’s sword knocking an orcish arrow clean out of the air before it can strike his back, as his brother pushes him out of the line of a second.  He sees Elros wince, as the arrow that has grazed his wrist leaves a raw, bleeding scrape.

Elrond’s body seems to register the threat before his consciousness has caught up: four orcs approaching with drawn blades, two more in the trees, their bows strung.  Elros, fumbling to draw his knife with his injured wrist, sends a laughing – _“I should never have complained!”_ – into Elrond’s mind as he switches hands to land to knife with perfect aim straight into one of the oncoming creatures’ foreheads.  Both naturally-left-handed Peredhil had whined bitterly as children, when their teacher had insisted that they gain proficiency fighting with either hand.  The light, unafraid tone of Elros’s voice in his mind, and the ease with which his twin draws his sword right-handed and falls into the fight with blood still flowing freely across his other hand and a kind of joyful relief blossoming perceptibly though his mind – as though his easily-bored twin had been secretly _hoping_ for a sudden attack – reminds Elrond painfully of exactly how much more experience in battle his brother has, than he.

It is that thought, and the horror that Elros should have to _save him_ because he was shirking his own duty, and the nauseating fear of what might have happened if his brother had not been there, that drives him forward with the same frustrated rage at his own inadequacies that have laid waste to so many training-dummies back in their camp.  The soft nudge of instructions from his brother’s mind as they wordlessly orient themselves to fight back-to-back, mixes with the tinge of red anger on the corners of his vision, as he blocks the first blow from a slightly rusted orc-blade.

He hears the ring of Nornonis drawing her dagger behind him, and now this is a selfish means to prove himself, as though to leave her even one creature to fight on her own would be an insult to his honor.  He has only ever slain orcs with his bow, hidden a safe distance away in the hedge of their camp; and though Maedhros had insisted that he personally dispose of those bodies, the experience had not prepared him for the way the viscous, dark blood of the first orc splatters across his own chainmail and stinks of rotten meat, or the way the second orc still twitches and spasms, a heaving mass of flesh and metal, even after the creature is no longer able to stand.  He finds the weak point in the third orc’s armor where the breastplate meets the shoulder, stabbing upward as he kicks the creature down; and as he corners the injured creature against the elder-bushes he could swear that their branches almost seem to kick the orc down, allowing him to land his final blow.

And when it is over, he sees the remaining elves of their party lurking some way off, waiting poised and ready to strike, but holding off, presumably at Maedhros’s command, and wonders fleetingly if his foster-father had done this on purpose, to test him.  That thought forces him to hold back the urge to vomit, tingling in the back of his throat.  But Elros is grinning widely, as nonchalantly as though he had just won a wrestling competition with Ectarmo.

That a small clump of athelas had been growing unnoticed under a nearby oak tree is almost unsurprising _(sometimes plants come when we need them most)_ , and in his guilt that this was somehow _all his fault_ he makes no retort as Elros good-naturedly curses and swears at him while he cleans the wound at his twin’s wrist, chewing the leaves and flowers together into a poultice and pressing it against the place where the poison in the arrow has tinged his skin with purple and black.  And though with his Sight he can see that he has drawn out the toxin in time, and that the shallow cut is not a great worry, still he cannot help but feel frustrated at his twin’s nonchalance.  And it seems to him, once again, that Elros is secretly glad of the excitement.

“Tell me what you did wrong,” Maedhros commands, when all has settled down again, and though his tone leaves no room for argument, it holds no anger either.

“It was my fault,” he answers at once, gaze focused on the other elf’s boots, acutely aware that he is not only a well-loved foster-son and prince, but also a soldier who has failed his orders, and he would add _my lord_ if he did not fear that Maedhros would mock him for it.  “I should have been keeping watch properly, and not gotten so caught up in the harvest that I forgot my duty.  I should have been more attentive when I was watching from above, yesterday.  I should have…”  He bites at the inside of his lip.

“Yes.  It was.  You should have.”

Elrond steels himself to be reprimanded.

“But, no one has been badly hurt; much bigger mistakes could have been made; and we have the information we need.  You are much younger than you give yourself credit for, and I would far rather you learn from small mistakes now, than grow too proud and make larger ones later on.”

Elrond nods, embarrassed, feeling his lower lip trembling.

“You fought well,” Maedhros tells him sternly, as though fearing disagreement, and puts his hand to Elrond’s shoulder for a moment, a rare display of affection.  And when Maedhros decrees that having to carry the heavy baskets of roots and berries on his back for the journey home, while he and Ectarmo stand guard, is a fit punishment, Elrond secretly finds it a relief.

He manages to hold in his tears until they have made camp for the evening, and Elros, seeming cheerful and not the slightest bit annoyed with his twin, has gotten into a quiet but seemingly heated debate with the others, some distance away.  Elrond has been ordered to light a small fire, this night, as protection against a possible Spider attack.  He suspects that this is as much Maedhros’s desire to give him something to do, and to force him to practice making fire in the wild, as it is any real need.  The stalk of horseweed that he uses as a drill, spins uselessly against its nest of coltsfoot tinder, and for a few moments it seems more likely that the painful friction of his hands rubbing together is more likely to set a fire than the contraption itself.  Medicine he could make more easily from these plants, than flame; and adrenaline and pent-up guilt make the activity feel like a metaphor for his own inadequacy.  It takes several humiliatingly long moments and a little whispered song to Aulë the fire-keeper, before the first flames spring up for him.

Now that the others appear deep in conversation some distance away, and so while keeping his back to him, he lets himself weep, very quietly, tears rolling down to tinge the corners of his lips with salt, trying to keep his shoulders from shaking too hard as he pretends to be very involved in rearranging the logs of his small fire.  Uptight at the thought of being caught off his guard again, he keeps his ears pricked to attention, and is aware of Maedhros’s near silent approach.

Maedhros quietly compliments his fire-making, looking him in the eyes.  “Are you still upset about this morning?”  He sounds much softer now, more father than commander.

He nods and shakes his head at once.  The taste of salt and woodsmoke mingle on his lips.  None of the others have seemed to notice anything, save Elros who calls a questioning _“Are you alright over there?”_ inside his mind.  He sends Elros a vague affirmative emotion, as he tells Maedhros, “Yes.  No.  I… get so afraid of losing you.  All of you.  Any of you.  That it could have been my fault.  I shouldn’t have been crying like that.  It was weak, it was girly, and it’s as you said, it was nothing to be upset about – I am sorry  – ”

“You have never once in your life apologized to me for anything and that is _absolutely unacceptable_ way to start.” Maedhros’s tone is sharp, but there is compassion in his eyes.  “All neri weep – never tell yourself otherwise.  The best neri I’ve known, have all wept, and not always quietly.”  He gives a quiet, ironic laugh. “Even _I_ have been known to weep on occasion, and your mother’s analysis may not be entirely incorrect: I am not sure that I _can_ prove that I am not an orc.”

“Canine bone structure?” Elrond suggests with a shaky not-laugh as he tries to clear the still-heavy feeling of tears behind his eyes.

Maedhros laughs outright at this.  “The orc,” he says, back into his serious lesson-voice now, much in the way he might point to three animal-prints and a feather in the snow and say, _tell me what happened here_ , “is the failure of the elvish body.  An orc has free will of a kind – not like a wraith that will cease to exist if its necromancer falls.  Orcish society has its own social norms and taboos, and is not entirely without morals.  And yet the orc serves the enemy’s will.  When, precisely, does one formally pass the point of being elf?”  His voice is impersonal, as though they are discussing some minor technicality in the use of melissa versus cowslip for chronic headaches in the Secondborn.  But though he does not say it aloud, Elrond hears: _It is comparatively easy to be not-quite-orc when you can hold your head up and say: the enemy could not bow me._

“There,” Maedhros says instead.  “I can see it.  Can you tell me with your Sight, which plant we are looking for?”

Elrond can find which herb will help a patient in the healers’ tent, simply by standing very quietly in the center of the medicine-garden, and he is never wrong.  But he is shaken, and unsure, and the plants he sees are all ones that he recognizes.  He tries to let his mind reach out on its own, but sees nothing.

Maedhros is waiting patiently with his arms crossed.

Elrond paces around, naming them all in his mind: creeping speedwell and devil’s claw and partridgeberry.  He chews at his lower lip in frustration, trying to relax into every thought he has been processing like a whirlwind over the past few months. “I can’t See anything,” he says finally, frustrated.  “Usually there would be a sort of glow, a tug, like it was calling to me.  Sometimes the plants speak to me with voices, like a song sung very low.  Sometimes I have to explain what is going on, before I get an answer.  But this… it must not want me.  You must have been wrong.”

“How did you phrase it, in your head?” Maedhros has sat down lightly against a nearby rock, entire body on edge, darting between the trees.  Some distance away, Elros and Ectarmo have moved on to an impromptu knife-throwing competition into a target carved into the stump of a dead tree.

Elrond does not answer, mind whirling.  He had been thinking: _where is this plant that would make me a real nér._ Already he can picture how deeply Maedhros might critique _that_ : and the more he tries to argue it in his head, the more he knows the other would be right to do so.  He sits down too, cross-legged, trying to ground himself as he does when he is speaking to the water in the stream.  He can name at least ten different species of tree within his vision, and he spots the tiny spark of movement that he recognizes as a fox, some distance away beneath some low-growing foliage.  He tries to describe of himself in the way the healers would speak amongst themselves: a withering fatigue after he pushes his body too hard again and again, like a fire that can never seem to catch enough fuel to burn properly.  “There.”

The plant has five leaves in a whorl, pale green with a cluster of new berries underneath, just barely darkened to red.

Maedhros stands again, nods.  “Yes.  How did you know?”

“I don’t know.  Was it the color of the berries?  I thought it was sarsaparilla, at first, until I realized of course they were red and not dark.  And they almost seemed to glow.  Like they were trying to tell me something.”  He retrieves a digging-fork stashed with the rest of his belongings, some ways away.

Maedhros makes him recite the energetic properties and contraindications of ginseng, over and over, referencing several texts in both Sindarin and Quenya of which he has never heard, occasionally slipping into a few lines of an old Noldorin harvest-song in his deep, husky voice.  “…being heating and drying, it is contraindicated in all conditions with _fire rising_ or _excess heat_ , as it is called – when the pulse is taunt and over-forceful, hyperfunctioning adrenal conditions, or of course, in chronic Fëanorianism – ”

It takes Elrond a second to register the joke.  He stifles a chortle.  He realizes that there was a time when he would not have laughed at such a jest.  The soil here is compact, and the long taproots almost elf-shaped, making him feel as though he is unearthing a sentient being.  He holds the new roots as gingerly as though they are truly little babies of Yavanna, cradled in his arms.

“…to be taken for than two moons in a row, according to the work presented in _Of the Flora of Lórien_ , with a break of a full cycle of the moon in between; and if you are prescribing for another, I should mention that _The Art of Blending Medicinals_ states quite clearly that ‘ _nissi should not use ginseng at a full dose for more than ten days because of its strong androgenic effect which can cause male characteristics to develop in physicality and character with long-term use_ ’ – but do stop looking so smug.  And give your thanks Estë, and Yavanna too - such a strong medicine should not be taken without proper deference.  Proper deference absolutely includes taking that break, I might add, and if I catch you mixing this with the yohimbe that’s conveniently vanished from our apothecary…”

It takes all of Elrond’s self-control not to nibble off a piece from one of the three long, almost elf-shaped taproots for the remainder of the journey; he cleans them in the river but keeps them tucked into his pocket, liking their presence so close to his body, so that by the time he has the opportunity to process and extract them, they already feel like a friend.

 

*

 

Elrond is running laps around the outer edge of the camp for the pure joy of it, his whole body almost unbearably hot, the heat like a thickness in his veins.  He has jogged on ahead of Elros, promising to catch up with them from behind.  He hears Elros call him _Show-off_ in his mind, but ignores it.  Maybe it’s the human blood in him, maybe it’s the two tunics layered over his binder, and very likely it’s the herbal concoction he’s once again taken three doses of – but certainly he is sweating more than any maia-blooded elf should be.  His blood is churning in him like soup in a cauldron.  He can feel the color rising to his cheeks.  Thunder of an approaching storm sends its first rumble through his bare feet.  The air is growing heavier.  He pauses, panting.

He remembers what the healers have taught him, about the dynamic force in fire and the yielding of water, and thinks fleetingly of the star that was his mother plunging toward the watery depths of the ocean, and the new fire-haired father who had lit his city in flames. He feels his pulse all the way to his fingers.  He looks down at his own hands, hot to the touch, just as the first raindrops fall.

The sky opens all at once, a wrathful burst of water that leaves his clothing almost entirely soaked through before he can make it into the nearby _not-so-Great-Hall_ , as Maedhros likes to phrase it when out of the earshot of any but the peredhil or Makalaurë.  The building is one of the most recent additions to their increasingly-permanent settlement, and he is still not accustomed to its presence, after so many years sitting out under the stars.  Maedhros is seated at the table that spans one end, deep in conversation with several other elves, and a few other groups of elves are seated in small, quiet groups, holding bowls of the various foods he had left for them in the large cauldrons over the low-burning fire at the center of the hall.  Of late, Elrond has taken it upon himself to prepare more than his share of their communal meals, if only because filling soups with liberal quantities of cleansing and mood-boosting medicinal herbs provides the much-needed illusion of control over the simmering, stagnating melancholy that lurks behind the eyes of everyone around him.  _(“Not to mention, that none shall have a single stray drop of estrogen anywhere in their hröar,” Maedhros quipped, one eyebrow raised, after the eighth day in a row of being presented with a concoction of mushrooms and pumpkin-seeds.)_

Rain patters and pounds against the roof as Elrond stands in the doorway and watches whole sheets of water fall past him, as though Manwë is dumping vengeful buckets down from the clouds.  His chill, wet clothing against his skin is a relief against the nervous jittering in his chest.  He holds out one hand into the rain, feeling the cool water against the heat still pulsing through his veins.

He steps away from the doorframe as a few elves exit, hoods of their cloaks pulled up against the rain, politely nodding to him and murmuring _my prince_ as they dart out into the pouring rain with heads bowed.

Maedhros does not leave with the others, but looks at Elrond calculatingly.  “Are you not cold?”

He is shivering, now that he thinks of it, great spasming shivers in the core of his abdomen.  Indeed, it must seem odd that he has not removed his sopping outer layer of clothing or settled down by the fire.  “Not at all!  I feel…”  He already senses that he is about to be reprimanded.  He holds out his shaking hands, staring down at them, almost able to visibly see the fire rising there.   “Invincible.  I can feel the blood in my veins.”

Maedhros shakes his head, and Elrond cannot quite tell if the other is laughing or concerned. “You have _multiple years of advanced training in botanical medicine_.”  He gestures to Elrond to come further inside, and the other begrudgingly acquiesces.

“I do, and I ran nearly three leagues today, and I’ve beat Telumbion and Ectarmo in the training-ring twice already.”  He peels off his outer tunic and hangs it over a low bench beside the fire, settling down beside it.  Though the overwhelming heat underneath his skin has cooled somewhat, still his abdomen is clenching and spasming unpleasantly.

Maedhros’s sigh might be exasperation or worry; he speaks softly, careful not to draw the attention of the other elves in the room. “As much as I desire you to be invincibly strong and comfortable in your own hröa, I would much prefer that you did so without dangerously raising your internal body temperature or giving yourself convulsions.  Tell me, as a healer: what would you do, if a patient came to you and said, I have been having hot flashes and shivers and insomnia because I overdosed on stimulants and phytoandrogens?”

Too well he is accustomed to the manner wherein Makalaurë will easily accept any false reassurances of his wellbeing, whereas Maedhros is seemingly impossible to fool.  “Wood betony, maybe, for tremors?  Or perhaps catnip?”

His foster-father is watching him stoically, but he doesn’t need the Sight to pick up on the wry sarcasm embedded in that gaze.

 “Alright, I _know_ what you’re going to say, but it’s not _fair._ ” 

“Many things aren’t.  Though, I might venture to suggest that your own impatience may be a factor.  These things take time.”

Elrond kicks his legs at the foot of the bench.  “It’s never _enough_ ,” he mutters, keeping his voice low, though no one appears to be listening in.  “People will think of me as a nís no matter what I do.”

“Is this about your friend?”  Maedhros has periodically reminded Elrond of all the hazards of theoretically courting a Fëanorian, and Elrond has gone on insisting that they are not _courting_ anyway, until the discussion has grown tired and stale.  But his foster-father does not sound reprimanding now, only concerned.

Elrond sighs, staring vacantly at the great soup-pots on the fire before him, the very sight of the making his stomach turn.  “She likes – ” he breaks off, mortified, adjusting his posture so that he is sitting cross-legged on the bench, a habit that Makalaurë reprimands he and Maedhros for in equal measure.  He focuses on looking anywhere except Maedhros.  “I think she only likes me as a girl.  I mean: she likes to play with – ” _my breasts_ gets mumbled in inaudible embarrassment into the hand where he rests his face, shoulders twisting as he attempts to keep his face hidden while still watching the other elf out of the corner of his eye.

Maedhros very kindly does not force eye contact.  “Have you spoken with her about this?”

Elrond shakes his head without removing it from his hand, already wishing he had not spoken.

“I wish there were an easy way around this.  If she truly cares for you, if she is truly the one you are meant to be with – and you know my opinions on _that_ matter already – she will care for the person you are, and not the one she first took you for.”

“But how do you _know_?”

Maedhros does not answer for a few seconds, the slight hardness around his eyes the only indication that he has not dismissed the question and is considering his words.  “I once loved an elf who said I was the fairest princess he'd ever seen.  But I told him that this was not the case, and that only made his love stronger.”  There is something at once nostalgic and wistful and bitter in his tone; but he keeps talking before Elrond can voice the questions he so desperately wants to ask.  “I will say this: if you want to make sure she sees you as a nér and not a nís, that is a conversation that the two of you will have to have.  But if you should decide, as your brother says he may, that you are a man and not an elf, you must think long and hard about whether it is fair for you to be dragging _any_ elf into that fate.”

“Elros had a dream,” Elrond says, unsure of how his brother would feel about him sharing this information.  “He said that he thought it was a kind of foresight, but he would not say how he knew.  In his dream, he was a king of men, and his ears were rounded like a man’s, and he had a long white beard like an old man.  And if the Valar can do all _that_ – if they can let him decide to change his own hröa so utterly, surely…”

“Have you had such a dream?”

Elrond shakes his head.  “I only catch glimpses of futures I don’t understand: battles, dragons, cities falling, mountains crumbling, seas rising.  I am never in them – as though I don’t have a future, at all.  Sometimes I do hear a voice, though it does not speak with words, and I know it to be Ulmo.  But he speaks only in riddles!” Elrond exclaims, frustration showing in his voice.  “He does not answer my questions, and he only says: _your fate will be decided after the sea rises._  Am I going to drown?  To sail to the West as my father did?”

Maedhros smiles.  “That is a good deal more than most elves have _ever_ heard from the Lord of All Waters.  The Valar don't _have_ to care about us at all, you know.”

Elrond is slightly abashed.   “I just don’t want to be _bound_ , all the time, for ever and ever,” he says finally, not quite changing the subject.  “It’s not that I’m not grateful, but as you once said about posture – I don’t want to be _stuck_.”  The last claps of thunder are fading into the distance, and the drumming of rain on the roof dwindles to a patter.  The double-meaning of his wording hangs between them on the air.

 

*

 

He is gathering damiana, caught up in the harvest-song that Makalaurë had taught him, caught up in concentration, simultaneously trying to keep his voice low and even, and to weave the proper magic into it.  _Harvest is a conversation, whether you are singing or not_ , Maedhros always tells him, _like Makalaurë’s laments: you must tell the plant who is hurting, and why.  Otherwise how can you expect them to hold your hand?_ He pauses here and there to nibble a few leaves and let their mild bitterness sink through his body.

“El!  You’d said you would return an hour ago.  How do you _ever_ expect to kill me if you skip your sword-training?”  But Maedhros does not truly sound upset, only weary.  The field of flowers spreads out between them, deep green dotted with yellow-gold.

Elrond breaks off his song, and frowns.  “I wish you would not speak so.”  He blinks a few times, startled at his own words.  Maybe it is the reassuring feel of a plant that he knows and trusts in his hands, and in his body.  Or perhaps it is the wild joy of the herbal concoction that has been slowly spreading through his entire physiology in ways he cannot wholly measure – in their mirrorless camp, caught in a perpetual question of _is my body changed or is the way I see my body changed_ , he only knows a wild self-confidence and physical strength that he has never before experienced, and the deep-seated knowledge that he could not return to the person he had been a year ago even if he desired it.  Emboldened by his own honesty, Elrond presses on: “I couldn't kill you any more than I could kill my birth father.  You _act_ like you care about me, but then you always try to remind me to hate you!  Either you want me to be here with you, or you don't!  Don't make me be half here.  Where is the other half of me?”

Maedhros looks as though has been slapped.  The meadow is bright in the way that everything has become bright-by-contrast, with the lingering threat of orcs and the ever-present stormclouds in the distance.  A long moment of silence passes between them, in which Elrond puts his harvest-knife back into his belt and slings the bag of fresh damiana stalks over his shoulder, but does not step forward.

“El… I have no desire to speak in a manner that offends you.  Your presence is… a gift that none of us deserve.  I cannot help but to wish that you were far away from here, all of you, whole and happy, where my actions cannot hurt you.”

“Elrond,” he says.

Maedhros draws his brows together questioningly.

“I can’t be Elwen; I’m _not_ an Elwen.  And I have been thinking, about how you found me, hiding in that cave alongside the waterfall behind Sirion.  _Elf of the cave_.  I couldn’t be the person I might have been before that, even if I wanted to.”

Maedhros’s expression is very difficult to read.  “I did not _just happen to stumble across_ you, do not seek to gloss over – ”

“I don’t _want_ to be angry!” Elrond bursts out, and is as surprised at the eagerness in his own voice, as he is proud to have improved in the art of keeping his voice low even when too many emotions are rushing through him at once.  He brushes a hand against the nearest flower-top to steady himself.  “Neither of us can change what has happened – and no, don’t seek to tell me that I’m being naïve – I know what you’ve done, but I’m so very _tired_ of being sad and cynical all the time.  And if _you_ can choose to name yourself because something hurt you, why can’t I?”  Maedhros is one of the only Noldor in the camp who has not reverted back to a Quenya name.  “And will you stop it with all your _failure-of-the-elvish-body_ and _I-don’t-deserve_.  You can’t expect me to believe you that no one need deserve to be themselves, if you don’t even believe it yourself.  I am the nér that I am because you and Makalaurë are my atari and living with you taught me how to be a nér, and therefore it is _good_ that I am here, because I _like_ who I am.  Just let me be happy for once!  Just allow me to enjoy my life without hating yourself for it.  It doesn’t make it any better, anyway.”

They stare at one other for a long moment.  Elrond does not think he has ever seen his foster-father at such a loss for words.

“Maybe,” Elrond adds at last, his breath catching in his throat as though he has just run a very long distance, “if I am a nér, if I _really_ get to live my whole life as a nér, then many things are possible that might not once have seemed so.”

Maedhros smiles ruefully.  “I would like to believe that, for your sake,” he says, and there is a softness in his tone that Elrond usually only hears when he is speaking to Makalaurë.  “Alright – not to kill me then, but because you are a talented fighter and because it would break my heart if anything bad should ever befall you, will you come back for your lesson?”

Elrond nods.

He walks home with bundles of stalks of yellow flowers gathered in his arms and tucked into his belt and poking out from his pockets, the eight-pointed star on his brow, barefoot, with grass-stains on the knees of his leggings.  He walks home with his head high and Maedhros following just behind him.

And though he strongly suspects that the other lets him win their last sparring-match on purpose, still there is something deeply satisfying about holding his sword to the other elf’s throat, with no anger, no hidden motive, only the leaping joy of victory.

 

*

 

When Elrond lets his hair free, it reaches halfway down his back, and nearly as far in a halo around his head, though it is usually pulled back tightly at the base of his neck for practicality.  Tonight, Makalaurë hopefully suggests some of the more complex layers of braids and ribbons that had once been fashionable when he was young in Valinor, the style that Elros used to scorn as _girly_ until he noticed the look on his twin’s face. Elrond gladly agrees.  It is the peredhil’s nineteenth begetting-day, and his first begetting-day as _Elrond_ ; he finds himself simultaneously not wanting to draw attention to this fact, and eager to look as princely as possible.  The familiar feel of Makalaurë’s hands pulling his hair tight, steadies the nervous flutter in his chest.  Makalaurë gifts Elrond a silver circlet, more intricate than those of his own that Elrond had previously taken to borrowing: “It was my brother’s – it reminds me of your flower-crowns – I would understand, if you don’t want to – ”

Elrond accepts the gift immediately, and Makalaurë reaches out to weave a few braids around the metal to hold it in place.  He does not recognize the pale jewels, translucent gold set in the shape of the eight-pointed star, the metal that holds them wound in the shapes of tiny leaves and vines.  “Which brother?”   Makalaurë rarely speaks of his brothers outside of necessary history lessons, but with his Sight he sees them in flashes of memory and dream, little scraps of imagery that he cannot quite piece together.

“Carnistir.  He was not much of a craftsperson himself, but trading with dwarves _was_ his craft.”  Makalaurë reaches out a hand once more, to adjust the slight tilt of the circlet against his brow.  “It seems a waste, for you to look so fair, only to sit in our crude halls.”

Elrond shakes his head.  “It’s perfect,” he says.  “It’s exactly what I wanted.  Thank you.”

Makalaurë steps back to appreciate his work, and says, with a soft air of wonder, “You look so much like your great-grandfather – like Turukáno, I mean – almost frighteningly so.”  He bites his lip and shakes his head, looking upon Elrond as though he is the lost hero of a long-ago time.

Elrond tries to look princely and not to grin too much, as he throws his arms around his foster-father, realizing that this is, the compliment he had been craving – not specifically the comparison to his predecessor, but _you look like a king of the Noldor_ –

But though Makalaurë is ordinarily the one to initiate an embrace, now he stiffens and pulls away.  “You are quite welcome, Elrond.”  His smile has grown thin and forced.  “I… have no desire to bring any unhappiness onto your begetting-day, but there are matters of which Maedhros and I would speak with you, later tonight.”

Elrond feels his elation immediately darken, but he holds Makalaurë’s gaze firmly and does not bow his head; he had been expecting this, and trying not to think about it, in equal measure.  “You’re going to send us away, aren’t you.”

“You have reached your majority according to the laws of the Secondborn, and whether or not you are granted the life of the Eldar, it is increasingly difficult to argue that you must be kept here for your own safety.”

“Good,” Elrond says, “because I’m not here for my own safety; I’m here because I don’t want to leave.  And if I am an adult, my decisions are my own, and unless you should command me as my lord, I have no intention of going anywhere.”  Makalaurë starts to interrupt, but he presses on: “no, don’t say it – I know that I cannot stay forever.  I _want_ to see more of Endórë, and I want to join the main force of the War.  But there is no hurry, beyond your own guilt.  Did you think we’d been just _sitting around, waiting to leave?_   There is much that I have still to learn from you, from all of you; and I have Seen enough in my dreams, that I think there will be decades of the Great War still to come, no matter how it should end.  I am sure they will save some orcs for us.”

“Or balrogs!” Elros adds brightly, slipping into the room.  Elrond wonders how long his had been listening; but he comes to stand back-to-back with his twin in the stance they might take in a swordfight, looking nearly as stubborn and ferocious as if that were so.

“Are you _trying_ to frighten me into allowing you to stay?”

“Absolutely!” Elros agrees.  “Come along, brother – there is much to get ready.”

A festival of bitter kinslayers on the edge of an apocalyptic war is not the brightest of affairs, but still all are willing to celebrate the existence of the peredhil, the uncursed spots of joy in their somber life.  And there are garlands of ivy hung from the ceiling of the main hall; and though there are hardly rations enough for a true feast, still there is extra of the nettle-wine and the moonshine flavored with wormwood, and there are many elves drinking again and again to their health, calling, _“to Elrond and Elros!”_

It is exhilarating.  It is overwhelming.  Strange wisps of others’ memories keep catching at him from all angles: ancient feasts in halls long fallen, joyous nights on the streets of cities that are no more.  Makalaurë has taken up his harp in one corner of the room, and several other elves have joined in singing, the determined optimism in their wavering voices at once heartening and heartwrenching.  Elrond slips away from his brother and friends, detangles himself from the crowd, and slips out the door.

A few more elves are gathered around a nearby fire, singing softly together, seemingly unaware of his silent presence.  The dark of the new moon throws the stars in sharp relief, making the brightest star on the horizon seem as a small sun in itself.  With all the jewels in his hair, he feels himself almost glowing in unison.  He stands there for a long while, watching that star, and speaking with it in his head, as he has since he was a child.  _It’s me – it’s your son – if you love me at all, you will forgive me for loving my other fathers in turn –_

It takes him a moment to realize that the formless grey shape half-hidden between the shadow of a gnarled maritime pine and the wall of a nearby tent, is Maedhros.  The early-autumn night is cool, but not cold, and the other elf looks as though he is wrapped in his thick cloak less to keep away the chill and more to render himself invisible.  Still, he straightens when he sees Elrond approach, and quietly joins him in his stargazing.  “Elrond – I hope you do not feel slighted that I should be avoiding your celebration.”

“Only if you aren’t slighted that I should avoid it as well.”

Maedhros presses his lips together slightly, thoughtfully surveying his appearance under the starlight.  “Makalaurë was right – you _do_ look just like him.”  Elrond suspects that the other does not mean that he looks like Turukáno.  “I hear you have rather forcibly put my brother in his place,” Maedhros says, wry laughter in his voice.  “And though I cannot pretend to agree with that decision, still it is good to see you standing up for yourself.   You are the best of us, you know, you and your brother – I did not think there was any good left in the House of Fëanáro at all, but there must have been, because I see it in you.”

Harp-music mixes with the smoke that rises from the hall nearby, and lingers on the air, bright as starlight.   Elrond does not think he has ever before felt like such an _equal,_ like two neri watching the stars in quiet solidarity.  The sky feels especially expansive tonight: a great map set with jewels, spread all the way to the corners of his vision.


End file.
